Adamsleigh — one of the last great estates built during an era of opulence and luxury. Noted architect Luther Lashmit considered Adamsleigh one of his greatest achievements noting that
“no expense was spared in its construction” which was during the 1930 depression. The sprawling mansion includes the main house as well as an attached servant’s/chauffeur’s wing.
The home at one time had two pools, a stable, pony ring & barn plus a five car auto court. Adamsleigh’s woodwork, materials, spiral stairway and other architectural features will long be
rivaled for their endurance of time. With over 17,000 square feet and 13.5 acres on the famed Donald Ross’s Sedgefield Golf & Country Club golf course,
it is indeed one of America’s last great estates. Price & brochure upon request.

Oak Hill Farm

3125 NC Highway 150East

Situated on three magnificent parcels of land totaling approx. 30 acres, this farm offers rolling land, water and numerous out-buildings. The main house has been beautifully renovated
including a state-of-the art Kitchen, hardwood floors, separate Laundry Room, Butler’s Pantry with wet bar and wine cooler. Formal living and dining rooms, family room with brick
fireplace and sunroom now overlook a slate patio with brick walls and side gardens. Enjoy all the bounties of mother nature yet still have convenience to shopping, schools and airport
all within Guilford County! Survey on file. Brochure available.

For more information about these fine Greensboro
properties contact Katie

... this stunning Irving Park home would tell you
how the founder of Sampson Sauce perfected his
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home has hosted. More recently it would tell you
about the remarkable renovation it received at the
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With apologies to Mr.
Eliot, during the 15 years
we lived on a coastal hill in
Maine, April really was the
cruelest of months, far more
fickle than anything he knew
in England — teasingly warm
one minute, biting cold the
next, with brave green crocus
shoots poking through the
hoarfrost one morning followed by a foot of new snow
falling the next, days alternating between mud and ice,
sun and gloom, and me the whole while dreaming of
spring back home in Carolina.
Several times I had to shovel snow from the front walk just to get out the
door for Easter services. And during those rare years we didn’t flee home for
the holiday. The simple act of watching the Masters telecast was almost too
much for my thawing senses to abide: all that lurid spring-green grass and
banks of blooming azaleas; all those reverently hushed and respectful galleries sunning themselves in the short sleeves; the greatest names in golf bent
to the task of earning the most coveted green jacket on the planet.
Do you blame a son of Old Catawba — who otherwise loved everything
about the simple life on a forested hill in Maine save for the approximate
two days of spring it offered — from going a tad stir-crazy? A little madness
in the spring, understood Dame Emily Dickinson, poet laureate of New
England shut-ins, is wholesome even for the King.
But forget the King — unless you mean His Majesty King Arnold, of course,
because April is really the start of golf season for many of us. To make matters worse, my father would invariably phone from Greensboro on Masters
Sunday to inquire, cheekily, if I’d seen any sign of my yard yet that spring.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

“Played over at Mid Pines yesterday
with the boys,” he would casually let out
like a showgirl accidentally showing too
much leg to the vets at the old soldiers’
home. “Looked better than Augusta
National. Wish you’d been with us. Your
mom thinks the dogwoods and azaleas
have never been more beautiful than this
year. I’d have to agree. This year they’re
something to see.”
Because I hail from a race made up
of far more gardeners than golfers, my
mom, on the extension, would cheerfully
inquire how my geographically challenged
“Southern” garden had fared through yet
another Maine winter. This was a small
cultivated spot between the decks on the
south-facing side of our house where I attempted, with varying rates of success, to
replicate the spring blooms so near and dear to my redneck heart. For several
years running, in a bold affront to nature, I transported a string of young and
entirely innocent Eastern redbud trees across several state lines and planted
them in my “Southern” garden hoping they would somehow find a way to
survive and even thrive and bloom their silly heads off. No single one did so,
proving it’s not nice to try and fool Mother Nature. My form of arborcide
became a source of family amusement for years.
“So how’s your garden looking this April?” I’d politely ask her in return,
knowing the answer even before I posed the question. Her spring flower
beds were always standouts, little wonder she’d been one of the garden
club volunteers who worked on the spring gardens at nearby Tanger Family
Bicentennial Garden.
“Oh, the daffodils came a bit earlier than expected and the cold nipped
them a bit. But the irises and tulips were simply lovely. And my peonies are
looking very good. Spring has really sprung here. You should see the azaleas
this year, honey, especially across the street! Joe Franks and Frank Sinatra
are doing their thing — a true sign of spring!”
I could just picture old Joe Franks across the street from my boyhood
home, polishing his beloved Cadillac with Ole Blue Eyes crooning from
his Caddy’s eight-track, his house bunkered by tens of thousands of blazing azalea, red, white and several shades of pink, dogwood petals drifting
April 2013

O.Henry 9

HomeTown
down like snow, sweetly oblivious to the steady
stream of cars bearing garden gawkers who
couldn’t fathom how one street could possibly
boast so many blooming shrubs. It wasn’t named
Dogwood Drive for nothing.
The Southern dogwood is a funny and frail
creature. It generally only lives 30 to 40 years
before it gives up the ghost to disease and decay.
The two glorious spreading giants in our yard, as
it happened — one pink, one white — lasted more
than half a century before they showed signs of
disease and seemed to lose sections of themselves
with every passing year.
By the time I moved home to North Carolina
seven years ago, taking up a sweet life between
Greensboro and the Sandhills, both they and my
parents had passed on and old Joe Franks had
polished his last Cadillac to the music of Ole Blue
Eyes. But the lovely single woman who bought my
parents’ house invited me to come dig up some
of my mom’s beloved peonies and day lilies and
transplant them to my own garden.
That’s a holy spring task I have yet to perform simply because now that I gave up my faux
Southern garden in Maine in favor of a lovely
old house we rent in Southern Pines, I really
have nowhere to dig in the soil and delve in the
soul, as the small garden sign in my mother’s
perennial beds read for decades. After reluctantly
parting with our house up North three years
ago — waiting a year too long to pull the trigger to
sell, thus losing a small fortune as the real estate
market tanked — we found a beautiful old house
in Weymouth Woods that’s owned by a retired
Pennsylvania couple. The house reminds me of
the Ludwig Bemelman’s beloved Madeleine story
that my daughter Maggie grew up loving, and
begins In an old house in Paris that was covered in
vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines.
As the ancients, all golfers, and certainly my
farming forebears understood, nature has a way
of reminding us who keeps the upper hand and
what’s really important, the impermanence of life
yet also the power of its annual renewal in the
form of glorious Southern spring, a perfect Easter
symbol of resurrection and the Masters’ famed
green jacket.
For years, I suppose, grieving in a quiet way for
the Northern garden I gave up helped mute my
itch to get down and dirty in the spring. The portico and modest half-moon terrace of the old house
where we’ve been surprisingly happy sufficed,
sheltered by a pair of Mediterranean hollies where
the robins invariably swarm in March, feasting on
red berries that make them feisty and drunk with
the nectar of returning spring, providing me just
enough space for a decent container garden that
begins to bloom modestly come April.
The redneck verdure in my Southern blood
seems to be reasserting itself with even more inten-

10 O.Henry

April 2013

sity this spring, however. I find myself cruising the
older neighborhoods of Greensboro and Southern
Pines looking at cottages and imagining myself as
the staff gardener in residence. “I’m an old man
but a young gardener,” Thomas Jefferson was
alleged to have remarked, and that certainly sums
up my own reviving passion for the dirt.
Some years back, not long before I came
home for good to the South, I slipped off to
South Africa for an entire month with a group
of blissfully obsessed plant hunters and had one
of the finest adventures of my life, venturing into
some of the wildest Afromontaine jungles on
Earth in quest of rare pineapple lilies and mountain hyacinths no larger than the tip of your little
finger, dodging angry Chakma baboons and
lethal spitting cobras. Every time they found
some extraordinary plant growing in its natural
habitat, my learned companions let out hoots of
joy — “hortgasms,” as I referred to their involuntary vocal passions.
The book that came out of this adventure,
Beautiful Madness, is far and away the most fun
book I’ve written. It reminded me of something important about my connection to the soil — namely
that I can’t ignore my other favorite outdoor passion
— my own beautiful madness — for long.
Especially at Masters time — which I’ll be
attending again this year, by the way — golf reasserts its comforting and familiar hold over me.
But it’s really my love of getting gloriously dirty
and working alone for hours in a garden of my
own making, fussing with the soil and planning
this new bed or that, digging out or planting in,
feeling the rain and smelling the spaded earth,
watching things come to life and briefly flourish
before they too pass on for another year that calls
out to my redneck soul. It’s the closest mortal
man can get, I sometimes think, to playing God
or simply brushing the divine. In one way or another, with each returning spring, we’re all going
the same way as my parents and old Joe Franks
and even Ole Blue Eyes.
In another Walter Mitty life I might happily have been a landscape designer or even
a golf course architect, several of whom are
among my closest friends. Winning the venerable Donald Ross Award from the Golf Course
Superintendent’s Association of America as I did
a couple years ago was not only a lovely surprise
but something of a sweet revelation that brought
everything full circle.
For me it all commences in earnest with sweet
April’s rising curtain. Someday very soon I’m
likely going to venture back to Dogwood Drive
and finally see about digging up those glorious
peonies that belong to my past — and future. OH
Contact editor Jim Dodson at jim@ohenrymag.com

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Breadth and Lit
In 1964, when the Woman’s College became the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, only two
universities in America had creative writing programs:
Stanford and the University of Iowa. Literary luminaries Fred Chappell, Robert Watson and Peter
Taylor helped UNCG become the third. “We
didn’t want some kind of magic wand program
where we handed out graduate programs for
signs of poetic sensitivity,” Chappell once
commented. “Our aim was to build a
community of writers. We wanted
to give students . . . the chance to
have the kinds of conversations that only
happen when you’re around other writers.” That’s also the idea behind
the North Carolina Writers’ Network’s Spring Conference, which
takes place on Saturday, April 13, on the campus of UNCG. Professor
Emerita Lee Zacharias will lead an all-day fiction workshop. Author Judy
Goldman will give pointers on writing your memoir. Andrew Saulters of
the Greensboro-based publisher Unicorn Press will demonstrate the fine
art of bookmaking. Over one hundred writers and publishing professionals will be there. Join them. Discounted tickets are available until
April 7. Here’s your chance to have lunch — and rub shoulders — with
our state’s literati. Info: www.ncwriters.org/2013-spring-conference. AW

devil’s in the details

dr. Funnyman

PHOTOGRAPH BY LORING MORTENSEN

There in the rarefied confines of Weatherspoon Art Museum — mounted
alongside a Cubist copper head of Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw and
a Willem de Kooning bronze in the exhibit Head to Head — the tortured gaze
of a horned and goateed fiend looks hauntingly familiar. Captured in plaster,
the half-tattooed head of Otto Long, a Greensboro artist who works in wood,
demands a second . . . third . . . or fourth glance. Aptly described as Demon
Head, it’s so startlingly realistic you
almost want to reach for your handkerchief and mop his furrowed brow
or bloodshot eye. Cast in 1995 by
then-UNCG-artist-in-residence John
Ahearn, Long once said, “I got tattoos
to get rid of my demons.” Ahearn,
who now works out of New York, met
the much-tattooed artist in a tattoo
parlor on Lee Street, says Elaine D.
Gustafson, Weaterspoon’s curator of
collections. “Otto self-identified as a
demon and the artist respected that
in his work and used it as a title,” she
says. The theme, though, dates back
to antiquity — “the depiction of the
duality of human nature.” Two current
exhibits featuring portraiture — Head
to Head and The Penetrating Gaze — are
drawn from the museum’s permanent
collection of 6,000 items and will be
up into June. Info: (336) 334-5770 or
weatherspoon.uncg.edu. DCB

The man who once compared the modern South to a pair of
comfortable tattered jeans is coming to Greensboro. Author of
1,001 Thing Everyone Should Know about the South, sociologist John
Shelton Reed will discuss his latest book, Dixie Bohemia: A French
Quarter Circle in the 1920s, at the annual dinner of the Friends of
the UNCG Libraries on April 29. The only sociologist to make Roy Blount’s list of funny people
in his Book of Southern Humor, Reed also penned
Holy Smoke: The Big Book of North Carolina
Barbecue, which he wrote with his wife, Dale
Volberg Reed. Born in Kingsport, Tennessee,
the man is a genuine Southerner, though his
education is Northern, with a bachelor’s from
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and
a doctorate from Columbia University. The
annual event, which begins at 6 p.m. in the
Elliott University Center, is the Friends of the
Libraries’ major fundraiser, with the money
going to Walter Clinton Jackson Library and the Harold
Schiffman Music Library. Tickets for members are $50 each; $60
for nonmembers. For information call (336) 334-4849 or click on
www.uncgfol.blogspot.com. JS

second Wind

Maybe we’re partial. OK, we’re real partial. But we’d like to point out O.Henry editor Jim Dodson has
won the U.S. Golf Association’s Herbert Warren Wind Book Award, a prize given every year for the most
outstanding contribution to golf literature. Dodson took the top prize for American Triumvirate: Sam Snead,
Byron Nelson, Ben Hogan, and the Modern Age of Golf, which The New York Times put on its 100 Notable Books
list last year. We’d also like to point out that this is J.D.’s second Wind award. He also won it for Ben Hogan:
An American Life, published in 2004. Dodson will get his second Wind, so to speak, during the week of the
Masters Tournament, April 8–14, but you don’t have to go to Augusta to say, “Congrats, Jimmy D.” Just come
to Barnes & Noble in Friendly Center — near Dodson’s alma mater, Grimsley High School — on April 25 at 7
p.m. We promise he’ll tell stories, read from his book, sign copies and flash that irrepressible grin of his. MJ

12 O.Henry

April 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Short Stories

talk of the town

sauce of the month

Sometime last year, Skip Moore, Lee
McAllister and a handful of their savvy
Weaver Foundation associates were sitting
around, talking about TED Talks — the
counterintuitive lecture series that examines a tantalizing array of topics, everything from “How a fly flies” to “How
to reverse climate change.” Suddenly, the idea struck them: “Let’s bring TED
here.” Basically, the whole premise of TED, which gives folks from the realms
of Technology, Entertainment and Design a platform upon which to exchange
ideas, is to gather people together and inspire conversations. On April 16,
speakers from Greensboro — professors, creators and industry leaders — will be
engaged in TEDxGreensboro, our own independently organized TED event.
They will also tap into the accumulated volume of the globally popular TED
talks, which anyone can watch online at www.ted.com/talks. Although there’s
only room for one hundred participants (chosen via ticket lottery in late March)
to attend the event at the Greensboro Historical Museum, various local sites including high schools, colleges and organizations will stream it live. “I hope what
it achieves is interest in further kinds of gatherings where people can get together
and talk,” says Moore. For more information and to inquire about how your site
might host a live stream event, visit www.tedxgreensboro.com. AW

My mother, rest her tortured soul, absolutely
cringed when my father and I would pour steak
sauce on almost everything she served. “You haven’t
even tasted it yet,” she’d wail. “I already know what
A.1 tastes like,” my dad would say with a grin. I
wish he were around to try Leblon Churrascaria
Brazilian Steakhouse’s Signature Steak Sauce, which
is sort of halfway between his beloved A.1 and my
personal favorite, Heinz 57. Thick, studded with
black pepper and hot enough to make you sit up
straight, Leblon’s steak sauce delivers an aromatic
and tangy overtone that will have you wondering
what’s the secret ingredient. The answer is the same
refined palate that has made the steakhouse one of
Greensboro’s favorite fine dining venues See “From
Brazil with Love,” page 27. Available from the restaurant at 106 South Holden Road; (336) 294-2605
or www.leblonsteakhouse.com. DCB

Cirque City
When 9-year-old Adrienn
Banhegyi skipped rope with her
schoolmates in Hungary, they
must have watched in awe as
they chanted something like:
“Cinderella dressed in yella,
went upstairs to kiss her fella,
made a mistake, kissed a snake,
how many doctors will it take?
One, two, three, four . . .” And
they counted and counted and
counted, certain that, eventually, she’d miss a beat. Flash
forward twenty years. Adrienn’s
still jumping — and from city
to city — as a Cirque du Soleil
rope-skipper and acrobat
extraordinaire in the whimsical stage production Quidam,
which lands at the Greensboro
Coliseum April 17–21. The
show, entirely dreamed up by
a curious young girl named
Zoé, takes the audience along
on a capricious journey during
which contortionists dangle
from bands of silk like spiders
working in the night, jugglers dazzle and a slew of various characters send one’s
imagination running wild. The jump-rope act, which includes Adrienn and nineteen other acrobats smiling like they can eat all the candy they want — will make you
breathe hard just watching it. Tickets start at $40 for adults, $28 and up for children
12 and under. For a performance schedule and more information, visit www.cirquedusoleil.com/quidam. AW
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Hop, sip ’n stroll
You do the math: Ticket price for Sip-n-Stroll? $25. Number
of venues, each offering two samples of beer or wine? More than
a dozen. Sounds to me a lot like a buck a beer. Not bad, especially
if it’s NODA’s Hop, Drop ’n Roll or Coco Loco Porter, available
at the Mellow Mushroom. Or in the wine arena, sample a 2010
Guenoc Victorian Claret 2010 or a 2012 Dry Creek Fume Blanc at
The Worx. But pace yourself: Sipping will begin at 1 p.m. sharp on
April 13 and ends at 6. Five hours, 24 samples. You might consider
wearing running shoes. And definitely grab a map at one of the
event tents at the south end of Elm near MLK Drive or the north
end of Elm near Friendly. “We anticipate that the restaurants will
pull out all the stops and, with the help of their distributors, feature
some of their very best beers and wines,” says Dianne Ziegler, president of the event’s producer, the Greensboro Downtown Residents’
Association. Participants include Crafted — The Art of the Taco,
Grey’s Tavern, Liberty Oak, Natty Greene’s, Tavo and Zeto.
Advance tickets $25 at springsipnstroll.eventbrite.com. Tickets on
the day of the event, $35, from the event tents. DCB

April 2013

O.Henry 13

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14 O.Henry

April 2013

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The Art & Soul of Greensboro

short story Contest
In honor of the anniversary of
William Sidney Porter’s 151st birthday, O.Henry magazine announces
its 2013 O.Henry Magazine Short
Story Contest. Check out the winners from last year’s contest by going
to http://www.ohenrymag.com/pastissues.html and clicking on the
October issue.
Open to Guilford County residents only, awards and cash prizes will
be presented to winners in three categories:
• High school students
• College students
• Adult writers
Contest guidelines:
• All submissions should be no more than 2,000 words in length.
• Entries should be emailed, along with complete contact information,
to Ohenryshortstories@gmail.com (or snail-mailed with a selfaddressed, stamped envelope to O.Henry Short Story Contest, 2103
Rolling Road, Greensboro, NC 27403).
• Winning entries and runners-up may be published in the magazine.
• Winners will be announced at a special birthday celebration.
• One entry per writer.
• All entries must be received by no later than July 1, 2013.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Working It

Short Stories

You might think of Guilford Technical Community College as a place
to hone workplace skills — and it is — but it’s also a ticket to arts and
entertainment. To wit, GTCC’s Fine Arts Theatre is putting on its very
first major musical, 9 to 5: The Musical, April 4—6 and 11—13. The show is
based on the 1980 hit comedy movie about female friendship and revenge
in the workplace. Several
GTCC grads — including the
choreographer and musical
director — are helping with the
production. Director Giuseppe
Ritorto is also a GTCC graduate and current faculty member. Performances — at the
Joseph S. Koury Hospitality
Careers Center, 601 High
Point Road in Jamestown
— begin a 8 p.m. Thursdays
through Saturdays, with additional matinee performances
at 2 p.m. Saturdays. (The show
is not recommended for children.) Tickets cost $15 and are
available at or www.highpointtheatre.com or by calling (336)
887-3001. A pre-show dinner
will be served by GTCC’s Culinary Arts Program at 7 p.m. April 4 and
April 11. Meal reservations can be made at http://culinary.gtcc.edu. MJ

April 2013

O.Henry 15

Some people always seem to be buttoned up

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High Point

I Greensboro I Winston Salem

Most Requested Recipe

the Bread
of Life
Yes, they have bananas
by david C. bailey

since Christ Lutheran Church’s first
worship service was held at General Greene Elementary
in 1958, a year before the sanctuary was built at the corner of Lawndale Drive and Pisgah Church Road, members have been sharing food, fellowship and, of course,
family recipes.
Picking out the best from all the rest is impossible, but Judy Woodham’s
pecan-and-chocolate-intensive Martha Washington candy is a candidate,
passed down from her grandmother. Or there’s Nan’s cheesecake, which has
“become a staple and centerpiece at a yearly holiday party we host for our
church council and staff,” Nancy Shellaway says. ”That amounts to more
than twenty-five years and fifty-plus cheesecakes,” she reflects.
Any good recipe, of course, needs an interesting backstory.
Judy Barrett recalls how she learned to make yogurt from scratch in the
1960s from an Armenian friend in Beacon Hill, Massachusetts. “You need
some to make some,” her friend explained in heavily accented English.
Barrett recalls how her friend suggested that she “wrap a Corning Ware bowl
in a sweater overnight and put it in an unlit oven.” The pilot light supplied
just enough heat to turn the mixture into yogurt.
From angry onions to St. Peter’s fish, from Aunt Bee’s kerosene cucumbers to raggedy robins, each recipe from Bread of Life has a rich history.
Genny Cobrda’s buttermilk-banana cake, frosted with coffee-and-chocolate
icing, is a contender for the church’s most-requested recipe. It has a rich
heritage. The original recipe is scribbled onto a small slip of paper, written in
her grandma Caroline’s Slovak tongue. “It was first transcribed to English for
a church cookbook in 1954, after being dictated from Yugoslavian to English
by my grandmother to my mother,” Cobrda says. “Growing up in Akron,
Ohio, my brother John and I knew a birthday celebration was never complete
without this special cake.” Cobrda’s grandmother used to whisper her secret
to them: “The bananas aren’t ready until they are brown, and look rotten!”
But in the eyes of those two children what will never be forgotten was the
cake’s prodigious size: “That cake was huge — three 10-inch layers, covered
with a chocolate icing like no other,” Cobrda says. Be advised, though. The
icing must be stirred nonstop, with the utmost care. No stopping once you’ve
started. And there were two more essential ingredients: “love and patience.”
“Even the walnuts have a story,” Cobrda says. “My grandfather would buy
whole walnuts in a huge canvas sack as big as my little brother, who was 4 at
the time. When I was old enough, Grandma would let me help her crack the
nuts, one at a time, using an old-fashioned nutcracker.” Then they had to be
chopped by hand. “No food processors in those days,” she recalls.
Cobrda’s cakes come close to those of her grandmother’s, but there’s a little
something missing: “She never measured anything, but each time the cake was
perfection,” she says. “The lesson we learned is: Never substitute anything!”
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Frosting:
�1/2 cup strong coffee
4 tablespoons butter, unsalted
4 squares baking chocolate
4 cups powdered sugar
2 teaspoons vanilla
Put the coffee, butter and chocolate in a pot. Heat carefully until melted.
You might want to use a double-boiler or a second, larger pot underneath
with water in it. Remove from the heat, gradually adding the sugar and
vanilla, while beating. Beat to frosting consistency. You should have enough
frosting to frost the center, top and sides. Garnish with walnuts, if desired.
Bread of Life is available from the ofﬁce of Christ Lutheran Church, 3600 Lawndale Drive,
for $15 or by mail order, including shipping for $19.95. Info: (336) 288-4482 or
www.lutheransonline.com/christlutherangso OH
April 2013

O.Henry 17

The Omnivorous Reader

The Great Refrainer

Silent Cal Coolidge and the business of saying as little as possible

By Stephen E. Smith

Americans tend to
indentify our media-savvy 20th
century presidents with their most
memorable soundbite — “I’m not
a crook,” “Read my lips. . . ,” “I
didn’t have sex with that woman,”
etc. — but it’s impossible to tell
where Calvin Coolidge, the first president to address the
American people via radio waves, falls on the oops-I’msorry-I-said-that scale. Silent Cal not only escapes being
identified with any egregious misstatements, he escapes
being identified with any utterance whatsoever. Indeed,
the question most Americans would ask about Coolidge
is: What did he say?
The answer, according to Amity Shlaes’ new biography, Coolidge: An
American Enigma, is not much. For Coolidge loquaciousness was a vice. All
his life he made a point of saying as little as possible, even though he held
more press conferences than any other American president, then or now.
What he did say usually fell into the tomorrow-is-another-day category of
self-verifying truisms: — “I am for economy, and after that I am for more
economy.” Also, “The business of America is business.”
Under Coolidge’s light-handed leadership the federal debt fell, the top
income tax rate came down by half, the federal budget was always in surplus, and the unemployment rate lingered at 5 percent. Although Coolidge
may have ridden the horse in the direction it was headed, there’s no denying
that during his administration Americans wired their homes for electricity,
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

bought their first cars or household appliances
on credit, took to the air in large numbers,
submitted more patent applications than ever
before, cut back on their nasty habit of lynching
fellow citizens, quit the Ku Klux Klan in droves,
lit the first White House Christmas tree and so
forth. Shlaes would have us believe that most
of the positive aspects of American life began to
flourish during Coolidge’s tenure, in large part
because he said and did little. She dubs Silent
Cal “the great refrainer.”
In her extensively researched biography, Shlaes includes all the obligatory
facts concerning Coolidge’s rise to power — his sojourn in city offices and
the state legislature, his stint as governor of Massachusetts, and in particular his handling of the long forgotten Boston police strike, the event that
catapulted him into the national limelight.
In September 1919, the majority of the Boston police force walked off the
job, leaving the city open to hooliganism and looting. Governor Coolidge
held to a hard line when dealing with Samuel Gompers and the union,
stating: “There is no right to strike against the public safety, anywhere, anytime,” a stance that would later be adopted by Ronald Reagan when dealing
with air traffic controllers.
Coolidge’s three years as Warren Harding’s vice president left the
American people with little insight into what his policies might be when
he assumed the presidency. They need not have been concerned. When
Coolidge took over the reins of government, the country was enjoying
unparalleled prosperity. As president, he worked to keep federal interference
at a minimum. He opposed farm subsidies, preferring a loan program. He
spoke out on civil rights, but did little to promote equal opportunity for minorities, and he ignored pleas for federal relief and flood control measures,
even when his native New England was ravaged by natural disasters. In
short, Coolidge was a president who strongly embodied the contemporary
Republican view of small government — which raises questions about the
timely appearance of Shlaes’ “scholarly” work and the responsibility and
April 2013

O.Henry 19

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20 O.Henry

April 2013

motives of the biographer writing during a time
of intense political turmoil.
Ms. Shlaes, a syndicated columnist for more
than a decade, is a former editor for the conservative The Wall Street Journal. She serves on
the board of the Calvin Coolidge Memorial
Foundation and is the author of The Forgotten
Man: A New History of the Great Depression,
whose hypothesis is that the New Deal only
worsened and prolonged the Great Depression.
In a recent editorial, she writes that Ronald
Reagan isn’t the only president who could right
our teetering economic system: “. . . if you look
back, past Dwight Eisenhower and around the
curve of history, you can find a Republican who
did all those things: Calvin Coolidge.” She
identifies Coolidge’s conservative approach to
governance as enjoying three advantages that
shaped a thriving economy. First is the Budget
and Accounting Act of 1921, which denied the
president control over the budget. The second
is Coolidge’s determination to make austerity
permanent. The third is Coolidge’s belief that
ambitious budget cuts would be accepted if he
could “align” them with ambitious tax cuts — all
gratifying information for those who share the
conservative viewpoint.
As soon as Coolidge appeared in bookstores, a
pundit no less than George Will wrote a column
touting the virtues of Ms. Shlaes’ biography
and the strengths of character demonstrated
by Coolidge, stating that if Barack Obama,
“America’s most loquacious president (699 firstterm teleprompter speeches),” could learn from
the Coolidge biography — and by extension,
from the man himself — the country would come
together in an orgy of love and thanksgiving.
Shlaes’ biography has been mentioned favorably
by Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe and on other
conservative news programs. Even the Raleigh
News and Observer ran a letter to the editor touting the new Coolidge biography, reminding liberal readers that Ronald Reagan hung a portrait
of Coolidge in his cabinet room.
Shlaes isn’t effusively enthusiastic about
Coolidge’s record as president, but she seems
to gently nudge readers into the inescapable
conclusion that Silent Cal’s approach to government is best reflected by today’s Republican
Party, such as it is. The serious reader, Democrat
or Republican, might do well to read David
Greenberg’s 2006 Calvin Coolidge, which fills in
some of Shlaes’ omissions and counterbalances
her view of our 30th president. OH
Stephen Smith’s most recent book of
poetry is A Short Report on the Fire
at Woolworths. He can be reached at
travisses@hotmail.com.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

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Wine Guy

A Spring Bouquet
of Rosés
The ideal chilled companion for the return of warm weather

By TC Frazier

As springtime approaches, a fresh
almost “new-ness” is in the air. Soon, paper bags will
be filled with huge zucchinis and red, ripe plum tomatoes. Spring showers will serve as an excuse to sit on
the porch and listen to Otis Redding. Kids will run
through fresh-cut grass with not a care in the world.
These moments can be fleeting. Similarly short-lived is
the vast array of rosés that adorn our favorite wine list
and pop up in shops from April to October.
As a wine industry person, I feel it is my job, nay my mission, to bring
fun, interesting wines to the foreground. I truly enjoy letting people know
that there are dry rieslings, or that merlot is OK to drink (after all it’s the
noble grape in bordeaux), or that some of the best values come from far
flung places that you can’t possibly say three times fast. Yet as adventurous
as we have become in America with our wine selections, I feel that rosés are
left largely unexplored.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The majority of rosé wines are made from red grapes. The red varietals most
often used in making a rosé wine include: pinot noir, syrah, grenache, merlot,
malbec, cabernet sauvignon, tempranillo, sangiovese and zinfandel. These
varietals may be either used solo or in a blend. Rosé varietals are often country
dependent, so a rosado from Spain will often be largely derived from a blend of
tempranillo and garnacha grapes, while Italy may use more sangiovese for its
rosatos. Here, we tend to lean more toward cab, merlot and zinfandel.
In making a rosé, the skins of red grapes are allowed to have less contact
with the grape juice than when making a red wine. The shorter the contact
time with the skins, the lighter the wine’s color will be. Extended time with
juice and skins yields some amazing, eye-catching color variations from vibrant orangey-pink to nothing less than a vivid hot pink. Sparkling rosés are
traditionally made with a blend of red and white grapes. While this practice
is usually limited to the sparkling category, it has also popped up in producing some interesting still rosé wines.
Rosés are perfect for spring and summer, as they are served chilled and
can be a refreshing accompaniment to warm weather fare. Rosé wines also
top the charts for food-friendly versatility. So, if you are opting for surf’n’
turf, rest assured that a rosé could handle both the seafood and the steak
in one fell sip. Also a great picnic wine, rosé tends to have a lighter body
and more delicate flavors on the palate, presenting a great wine partner for
a ham, chicken or roast beef sandwich, served with fruit-, potato- or eggApril 2013

O.Henry 23

Wine Guy

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salad. And it’s a perfect complement to chips and
dips. Rosés are also a great accompaniment for
a backyard barbecue, tackling hamburgers, hot
dogs and grilled corn with ease. What’s more,
the acidity in rosés tends to diminish faster than
other wines. So when Thanksgiving comes
around, I break out all my rosés hoarded since
early spring, because I’ve learned nothing goes
better with turkey, stuffing and mashed potatoes
than rosé.
Regrettably, rosé wines fell into disfavor when
the wine market was flooded with white zin lookalikes. Now many consumers are discovering
that rosés are so much more refined than those
sweet, wine-cooler quaffs and are embracing the
broad stylistic offerings on the rosé market from
all over the world. Wine-lovers and wine-makers
are both the better for it. Rosé wine sales are on
the rise as savvy oenophiles have discovered that
many of these pink wines are not sugary sweet,
but rather sophisticated summer sisters of red
wine varietals. Cheers!

Suggestions
Tempier Bandol, Provence, France
Grown in soil tilled both mechanically and by
hand without the use of herbicides, the vines are
grown without the use of any chemical fungicides. The grapes are harvested by hand and
carried in small bins. Clusters are hand selected
in the vineyard and in the cellar. You wanted the
best, you got the best.

Lamberti Brut Rosé, Italy
The fruit for this delightful off-dry pink prosecco is sourced from the best hillside vineyards
across Treviso in the Veneto region of Italy.
Expect white flowers, roses and red berries in the
nose, with red berry, apple and milk chocolate
flavors in the mouth. The finish is clean and
refreshing. This sparkling wine has a delicate,
lightly fruity style that will make it the perfect
aperitif on its own or served with salmon appetizers or delicately fried morsels, such as nuts.

Muga Rosé Rioja, Spain
Made from 60 percent garnacha, 30 percent
viura and 10 percent tempranillo, this rosada is
a very pale pink. Spicy orange, strawberry and
floral aromas mean very good clarity and energy.
Tangy, sappy red-fruit flavors are enlivened by
dusty minerality and a hint of white pepper.
Look for a finish with very good cut and length,
leaving orange zest and floral notes behind. OH
TC Frazier lives in Greensboro and has been in the
hospitality business since he was 14. He currently is
employed by Tryon Distributors.

are shed as red-bandannaed gauchos carve sizzling
slabs of pink lamb and juicy beef amid a rustic Brazilian backdrop of exposed bricks, polished hardwood
and gleaming brass. The Pantagonian gauchos-fromthe-grasslands atmosphere could hardly be more
masculine, with co-owner Walter Vanucci often frontand-center, charming guests with his rich accent and
cosmopolitan manners.
But the fireball behind Leblon’s success is a dynamic five-foot-four, ravenhaired Latina who doesn’t mind setting you straight about who’s riding herd
on those gauchos in, arguably, Greensboro’s most successful locally owned
steakhouse: “People walk in and they think I work for Walter,” says Ilma
Amaral, her eyes flashing. “They look at the restaurant and assume, ‘You’re
his wife and you came after this,’” she says, gesturing with a flip of the wrist
at the sea of neatly arrayed white linen napkins and crystal glassware awaiting guests. “It’s the other way around, people.”
After all, Walter Vanucci, 55, had limited restaurant experience in 1990
when he met Ilma at her highly successful four-star Continental restaurant,
which she and her brother Carlos Amaral founded in Roanoke, Virginia.
Once they became a couple, the two decided to pick up and move to
Greensboro, motivated by Triad diners who had vacation homes at Smith
Mountain Lake and kept telling them they’d be so much more successful
in Greensboro than Roanoke. Together, they opened the city’s first and
only Brazilian restaurant in 1996 to excellent reviews. In 2004, the couple
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

reopened it as a churrascaria, an all-you-can-eat steakhouse, then moved six
years later into a more visible location at the corner of Market and Holden,
supplanting the Gate City Chop House as the city’s premier, locally owned
purveyor of steak. But if this is beginning to sound a little like a story about
how a couple lovingly worked together to realize their dreams, forget it. “It’s
not,” says Ilma, 50, with finality. “It has to do with surviving. When you’re
an immigrant, you have to survive . . . I was raised without a father, and I
don’t have Plan B. I only have Plan A.”
Nowadays, Plan A includes a bold reinvention of the couple’s other restaurant, Monezi, which they just moved from a lackluster location on N.C.
Highway 68 near the airport to a more heavily trafficked spot once occupied
by Schlotzsky’s Deli, just west of Walmart off Wendover. Ilma admits the
concept is risky and totally different from Leblon Churrascaria Brazilian
Steakhouse — or anything else in Greensboro — a pay-by-the-pound
Brazilian and Continental buffet featuring fine-dining fare: chicken steeped
in dark Brazilian Xingu lager, for instance; seafood-studded paella; Italian
favorites such as eggplant Parmesan and lasagna; chicken in a lemon-cream
sauce with artichokes; and their fabulous signature collards, flash-fried in
olive oil and garlic. Call it casual elegance, if you will, but it’s a bold move
for the couple, just like the bakery on Muirs Chapel Road they opened in
2007 and closed a year later. “Many times, we have an argument, but I say
let’s do it because nothing lasts forever, and you have to constantly re-create
yourself,” Ilma says.
“The simple life is not complicated enough for her,” Walter adds.
Ilma Amaral was born in a town of 20,000 in an agriculturally rich section
of Brazil known for its cheese and coffee. Her father was a well-to-do German
immigrant, her mother Brazilian. “She married this guy who had a lot of money,” Ilma recalls, “and he left her to raise five kids on her own.” The house was
paid for and relatives and neighbors helped them out, but Ilma still wonders
how her mother managed to make ends meet working as an accomplished
knitter of artisan sweaters. All the children attended college on scholarships,
April 2013

O.Henry 27

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Serial Eater
Ilma says. After one of her brothers moved to Montreal in 1972, he managed
to file immigration papers for the whole family.
Although she had a teaching degree, Ilma went to work in Canada as a
sewing-machine operator. After three years, she moved to Toronto for a job
doing piecework for more than four times her original hourly wage of $3.75.
“I loved it, and I have no regrets,” she says. She bought a house, sublet the
first two floors to tenants and made extra cash cooking for them on the
side. “I made my first $100,000 by the time I was 23 years old in the real
estate market,” she says. In 1989 she sold the house and moved to Roanoke,
joining a small Brazilian community there. Using $48,000 to buy a Thai
restaurant, she and her brother, Carlos Amaral, who had previously served
as a chef in several four-star restaurants, opened a fine dining venue serving
Italian and Brazilian cuisine. It struggled for months but finally got a rave
review for its exceptional fare, cooked from scratch using fresh ingredients.
“We went from having twenty-five people a day to having three hundred,” Ilma recalls. As business picked up, her brother hired Walter, who
happened to be visiting friends in Roanoke, to help out as a waiter and
manager. Walter, the perfectionist, and Ilma, a Type-A, get-it-done sort, immediately clashed: “I told my brother to fire him. He was so slow,” Ilma says.
Walter Vanucci grew up in a well-heeled neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro.
His father was of Austrian extraction and worked as an accountant; his grandmother on his mother’s side was an Italian immigrant whom Walter remembers as an incredible cook. Eventually his mother opened her own pastry shop
in the ritzy Copacabana district, which she still operates. At 19, Walter had to
quit college because of his father’s death at 45. He worked at various jobs — in
his mom’s bakery and with a travel agency, which gave him the opportunity to
visit Miami, Hawaii, New York — and Roanoke.
Despite Ilma’s dictum, Walter didn’t get fired. Instead he started spend-

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

ing more time in the kitchen, where Carlos taught him how to cook: “He
was a great chef,” Walter says of Ilma’s brother, who still runs the restaurant
in Roanoke, “and I learned a lot from him.” In Greensboro, Ilma ran the
front of the house while Walter cooked. Finding the right menu items for
Greensboro was tough, Walter remembers.
The Brazilian national dish is called feijoada, a hearty black bean stew
that’s still offered at both restaurants. “In Brazil, the traditional way to
prepare it is with odd parts of the pig — the feet, the tail, the ears,” Walter
says. “At first, I did it traditionally, and the first person I served sent it
back to kitchen and said there’s no way I’m going to eat those things . . .
That was a red alert for me.” But with the help of Ilma, who’s always reading trade magazines and attending fancy-food shows, they created one of
Greensboro’s most eclectic à la carte menus, with an accent on seafood:
“She’s very creative,” he says, “always trying new things, rotating the menu.
Within the first year, we were breaking even.” Which was a good thing,
since they’d used their house as collateral to get a loan from BB&T.
It was touch-and-go for a while, Ilma recalls: “People sometimes commented, ‘Oh my God, you’re so empty. Do you think you’re going to make
it?’” She’d tell them with utter confidence, “Yes, I’m going to make it.” But
Greensboro was a much tougher market than Roanoke, with a lot more
competition, especially from big chains. Which is why Leblon abandoned
its à la carte format in 2004 and became the Triad’s first Brazilian steakhouse. It was an instant success, although Ilma says, “We lost 99 percent of
our regulars.” The new clientele was younger, and they saw a lot more business clients on expense accounts. “Our bar business tripled,” she says.
Some restaurateurs might be tempted to leave well enough alone, but not
Ilma. When their lease came up for renewal in 2010, she jumped at the chance
to move into Gate City Chop House’s prime location on Holden Road. Again,

April 2013

O.Henry 29

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30 O.Henry

April 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Serial Eater
putting their house on the line, they moved practically overnight: “We don’t take a month off to do
things,” Ilma says. “We closed Leblon up the street
on a Sunday, and on Tuesday we were open here.
It was crazy.”
Just as crazy was the schedule for opening
Monezi’s first location. They closed their illconceived Brazilian bakery and sandwich shop
on Muirs Chapel Road in June of 2008. “It was a
nonprofit organization,” says Walter. By August,
they’d opened Monezi, with Ilma eager to provide jobs for those who lost them at the bakery.
Admittedly shaken by the bakery’s failure, Ilma
says, “I got right back on the horse. I am Aries.
I think it has to do with my stubbornness, not
giving up.” Ilma had been thinking about the
Brazilian buffet concept for some time when she
stumbled across a restaurateur who practically
begged her to take the keys of his restaurant, with
all its furnishing . . . and a cooler full of food . . .
and three-months free rent. “The offer was too
good to turn down,” she says. By the time Walter
found out about it, it was practically a done deal.
Same with the bakery: “I don’t always tell him
what I’m going to do,” Ilma admits. “Sometimes,
he comes home and says, ‘What the hell is this?’”
Walter’s quick to give his wife credit for her
innovative ways: “She really does have a vision,”
he says. And Ilma’s gotten used to her husband’s
attention to detail and buttoned-down attitude
(he doesn’t drink and, though from Rio, disapproves of Carnival, she says). “He keeps an eye on
quality and he’s a perfectionist in the kitchen.”
Says Walter: “We execute well together.” True, she
agrees, “but I’m the one who takes all the risks.”
Despite being in the middle of a recession,
moving the steakhouse to the new location
almost doubled their business. It’s too soon to
say whether Monezi, which wasn’t a moneymaker at the old location, will experience similar
success. It was jammed on a recent weekend, but,
as the couple knows only too well, Greensboro
has a way of mobbing new restaurants for a few
months and then forgetting all about them.
That’s why Walter has gone back into the kitchen
at Monezi, preparing many of his old favorites with the help of a Brazilian cook, Helena
Almeida. Ilma’s son by her first marriage, Leo
Freitas, is a manager.
What’s next? “There’s something cooking,”
says Ilma. “But don’t say anything. Walter’s not
going to be able to sleep.” Giving her husband
sleepless nights is all about a promise she made
when she was a child: “I promised myself, and
not because I was a girl, that I would prove to my
brother and mom that I would be as successful
as my brothers.” Besides, she says, “Life becomes
too boring. Get stuck and you die.” OH

Bagels are a many-storied
food. Here’s the most likely: Centuries
ago King John Sobieski of Poland
helped the Austrians save Vienna
from marauding Turks. As a gesture
of thanks, a Jewish baker created
stirrup-shaped yeast rolls called a beugel
(“stirrup” in German) with which he
showered Sobieski and his victorious
horse brigade. Eventually, the stirrup
got rounded out and the beugel became
a bagel. Polish immigrants brought
their bagels to New York City — real
bagels, not blueberry-cinnamon-oat
bran-chocolate chip-heart shaped for
Valentine’s Day.
Blessedly, hard-shell plain bagels remained in New
York for decades. They were baked in the bowels of
Brooklyn or the Lower East Side and delivered
before dawn in big brown paper sacks to delis and
corner stores. Price: About a dollar a dozen.
They were, in a word, divine. We ate them untoasted with plain cream cheese (a little salty smoked
salmon, if you could afford it), for breakfast, never
lunch, brunch or snack. Nobody froze bagels or attempted to retain freshness with a plastic bag. Why, with fresh available every morning?
Then bagels were discovered. Discovery (even by Lender’s) is not a good
thing when it turns a classic into a Lady Gaga. Some food marketing genius
decided that tangy, chewy bagels deserved Americanizing. They should be
softer, sweeter, puffier.
And they should be everywhere. Soon freezer cases, bread counters, cake
bakeries stocked a dozen flavors, even colors, like green for St. Patrick’s Day.
An abomination!
Bagel shop chains, as well as local bagelries, sprung up. I was there, in
Burlington, Vermont, when attorney Nord Brue birthed Bruegger’s. I’ll give
him this: a Bruegger’s plain comes comfortably close to the real thing, which
is dead, dead, dead even in New York, even at Zabar’s. Experts blame the
flour, the water, the ovens. More likely the hands, the spirit, the respect.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

So, short of resurrection, we’ll work with what’s
available.
Plain (just not the mushy supermarket kind)
bagels make wonderful skillet pizzas: Cut in half,
place cut side down in a skillet or griddle rubbed
with olive oil. Brown lightly over medium heat. Turn
cut side up, top with best-quality pasta sauce from a
jar, pepperoni, spinach leaves, mushrooms, cheese,
anything. Cover skillet and continue cooking over
low heat until toppings are hot. For something
really special, use Alfredo sauce, chopped garlic, sweet
onion and cooked shrimp sliced lengthwise. Lightly
toasted plain bagels make the greatest dunkers for
thick pea or lentil soup, tomato bisque or the fancy
new offerings in cardboard containers.
Back at the breakfast table, use the pizza method to
heat bagels, flip, fill hole with an egg (graded small or
medium). Cover and cook over low heat until egg
reaches desired doneness. Or slice bagel lengthwise
into thirds; soak in an egg-milk mixture, brown in
butter like French toast, top with syrup, jam or warm
cinnamon applesauce.
I’m not much for bagel sandwiches; soft fillings
squish out the sides. Exception: sliced real turkey
(the kind you roast at home, white and dark meat)
and lettuce with Russian dressing (mayo and chili
sauce) on a pumpernickel bagel.
The New York bagels of my childhood may be gone
with the wind, but I’ve been bagel-blessed by living
in Montreal. Montreal bagels — hand-rolled, coated
with sesame or poppy seeds, baked around the clock
in wood-fired brick ovens at hole-in-the-wall bakeries —
earned the World’s Best title from Food & Wine magazine. They are chewy, never sweet. The flour and water must be just right. I
buy them hot — divine in a different way.
For a Southern city (other than Atlanta and Charlotte), Greensboro is
also bagel-blessed, I’m told. Bruegger’s, First Carolina Deli and Lox Stock &
Bagels — here I come.
Thomas Wolfe was wrong: You can go home again. Only problem, not
much at home is the same. But stuff happens. The Greeks left a giant wooden horse at the gates, to sneak into Troy. Lady Godiva rode naked through
Coventry to protest taxation. Horse-god Pegasus sprouted wings. Would
then, Epicurus, a Polish stirrup smeared with Carolina pimento cheese be
asking too much? OH
Deborah Salomon is a contributor to O.Henry and PineStraw.
She may be reached at debsalomon@nc.rr.com.
April 2013

O.Henry 33

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34 O.Henry

April 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Artist at Work

The beautiful, readable art
of calligraphy

By Tina FiresheeTs

PhotograPh by caSSie butler; calligraPhy by Pat leVitin

She calls it seduction in black ink.
Letters that curve like a woman’s figure.
Words of honor, love and passion that flow line by line.
This is what draws Pat Levitin to calligraphy.
The hand can take a simple sentence and turn it into a work of art.
Examples, framed and encased in glass, hang throughout Levitin’s home.
Her name and her husband’s name — Pat and Peter — with whimsical
trails of ink sprouting from the P’s and T’s.
Lines from Shakespeare’s play As You Like It, swirling in a circular pattern.
At the center lies the the play’s signature quote: “All the world’s a stage.”
***
Levitin took up calligraphy more than thirty years ago on a whim. She
had three young children — and a master’s degree in economics — but she
yearned for some creative time. So she signed up for a calligraphy class at
GTCC and left her children a few hours a week with a woman known as the
“neighborhood grandma.”
Every night, after she put her children to bed, Levitin cleared the kitchen
table and threw herself into perfecting each letter.
She got better. Then she got really good.
She attended workshops and international conferences.
Most of her teachers were British calligraphers who practice medieval methods.
They include Shelia Waters, who’s considered the mother of calligraphy.
Then there’s her mentor, Peter Thornton, regarded as a pioneer in the craft.
For years, Levitin stayed busy with calligraphy jobs and served as
president of the Carolina Lettering Society. When she enrolled in the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s art school in 1993, she
didn’t tell anyone about her calligraphy. But she couldn’t escape it. People
called her sculpture “calligraphic.”
Today, she works for the university, promoting UNCG in three programs, but calligraphy remains her passion and a thriving sideline business.
Many of her clients are men who have written original poems for their
wives or girlfriends. Those are her favorite jobs.
A client in the early 1990s came to her when he was dying of AIDS. He
wanted to leave his lover with a collection of poems.
She completes many wedding certificates and invitations.
One popular request is to create double intertwining hearts with the
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

bride’s and groom’s names with the date of their marriage.
Sometimes, people want her to copy a quote they’ve read.
Her most distinguished clients include the late Pat Sullivan, once chancellor of UNCG, who asked her to copy a poem written in honor of the
philanthropist Joe Bryan.
A relative of Maya Angelou’s also hired her to copy one of Angelou’s
poems. Levitin remembers hearing Queen Latifah read the poem at Michael
Jackson’s funeral.
“That would be so beautiful written in calligraphy,” she thought.
A week later, Angelou’s niece contacted her to copy the poem to give to
the Jackson family.
Her everyday handwriting? It’s better than your doctor’s signature.
***
When Levitin is in the calligraphy zone, her studio is silent. Her door
is closed.
She can’t lose her rhythm.
Her tools: textured, acid-free 100-percent rag paper, two to three sheets
per job.
At least two or three different calligraphy pens.
Black Sumi ink — the world’s blackest.
She lays it out on graph paper. Once the spacing is right, she can begin.
She takes a couple of deep breaths, and prays to her calligraphy gods.
Go.
The first line is the hardest. Her hand still shakes.
Word by word.
Line by line.
By the time she’s finished, her shoulders are tight. Her back aches.
Levitin, who stands 5-feet-10-inches, may have spent hours hunched over
her light table with no bathroom break.
And if she messes up?
Levitin is a perfectionist. She will redo for just one stray flick of ink or
oddly slanted letter. Even if she’s reached the final word.
She has learned to take it in stride.
Deep breath.
OK. That was a good sample, she tells herself.
The last line is just as hard as the first. OH
Tina Firesheets, a freelance writer living in Jamestown, gave up the glamorous
working life for toddler temper tantrums and endless demands to see Elmo.
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For sixty-six years this remarkably adaptable company
has put the flavor in thousands of beloved consumer products
Murphy’s Suzanne
Johnson once developed gin-flavored
thoothpaste.
“Why?” she
wondered

By Maria Johnson

Once in a while, the smells of

Photograph by Sam Froelich

vanilla, honey and brown sugar wafting from Mother
Murphy’s in south Greensboro grab passers-by who
stop at the front office, looking for the baked goods
they imagine behind the luscious scents.
Alas, their gratification is delayed.
Mother Murphy’s Laboratories Inc. doesn’t sell treats from the oven. Rather,
the 66-year-old Greensboro business sells flavorings to companies that do.
You’ll find Mother Murphy’s flavorings in major brands of snack cakes,
doughnuts, muffins, cookies, biscuits and pizza doughs.
Their flavorings also enhance candies, cereals, cough drops, yogurt, ice
cream, soft drinks, flavored liquors, cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, nutritional
supplements, pet foods and animal lures.
That’s right. Flavorings for catfish bait and deer feed.
“When I came to work here, I said, ‘Oh, we’re in this? We’re in this,
too?’” says vice president Robin Conner. “If you knew everything Mother
Murphy’s was in, you wouldn’t believe it.”
Save your disbelief because you’re not going to know all of the brands.
Many of Mother Murphy’s clients guard their recipes — and the source of
their flavorings — but company president David Murphy is willing to share
the identities of a few customers past and present.
Little Debbie, the snack cake company, bakes with Mother Murphy’s
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

flavorings. So does Dewey’s Bakery in Winston-Salem and Cheesecakes by
Alex in Greensboro.
Fast food behemoth McDonald’s uses Mother Murphy’s flavorings in
some of its drinks. Before Hostess went belly up, there was a little bit of
Greensboro in every Twinkie and Ho-Ho.
Mother Murphy’s also provides flavorings to High Point-based Hunter Farms,
which makes ice cream and dairy products for Harris Teeter grocery stores.
“We’re probably in two-thirds of the grocery aisles,” says David Murphy,
whose father developed a taste for the business in the 1940s.
Kermit Murphy was selling insurance for Jefferson Standard Life when
he discovered that Greensboro physician Richard Stelling, who examined
potential policy-holders, had put himself through college by making and
selling food flavorings. Stelling still tinkered with flavors in his basement.
Soon, he and Murphy formed a company, Southern Laboratories, which
sold fruit-flavored bases for fountain-style drinks. The dough started rolling
in when they added bakery flavorings.
In the 1950s, Kermit’s brother Pete joined the business, and the company
changed its name to Mother Murphy’s. Their logo featured a bespectacled
old lady. There was no granny in the lab, but company officials thought the
maternal name sounded more inviting. The old lady logo is no longer used
in marketing, but it remains on the side of the building at South Elm-Eugene
Street and Interstate 40/85, the epicenter of Mother Murphy’s production,
research and development.
The company also occupies a building on nearby Dougherty Street and
operates a bakery lab in Texas, where a master baker turns up the heat on
flavorings. Including sales people around the country, Mother Murphy’s
April 2013

O.Henry 37

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employs about one hundred, most of them in
Greensboro. Half have logged more than twenty
years with the company.
“Dad said, ‘Treat your customers like friends
and your employees like family,’” says David
Murphy. “We’ve got some world-class people.”
The Greensboro staff includes four certified
flavor chemists who lead efforts to develop new
tastes. There might be a quaint granny on the sign
out front, but the white coats inside mean business.
Want your company’s product to taste like another company’s product? Mother Murphy’s chemists can — with the help of mass spectrometry —
analyze and most likely duplicate the flavor. They
work with a palette that includes florals, nuts,
cheeses, butters, grains, fruits, sugars, chocolates,
coffees and the king of flavors — vanilla.
“We make one of the best vanillas in the
industry,” says David Murphy, citing a coldextraction technique used with vanilla beans.
So central is vanilla extract to Mother Murphy’s
success that botanical prints of the Madagascar
vanilla orchid decorate some of the wood-paneled
offices in the 1960s-era headquarters.
Recently, the company has taken advantage
of the public’s thirst for flavored liquors — think
of granny the next time you’re sipping honeysuckle-flavored vodka — as well as the hunger for
healthier sweets. For example, Mother Murphy’s
scientists have devised ways to mask the bitterness of the no-calorie sweetener stevia.
Among the more unusual flavors that Mother
Murphy’s has cooked up: dirt, pencil shavings
and baby wipes for a line of Harry Potter-inspired
jelly beans.
“They really tasted like baby wipes — or like
baby wipes smell,” says David Murphy.
Every year, he says, his company ships more
than nine million pounds of liquid and powdered
flavorings, putting the enterprise in the middle-tier of flavoring businesses, those with annual sales
of between five and one hundred million.
The smell of success? That would be whatever
scent clings to David Murphy’s clothes when
he leaves the office. People can only sniff and
wonder.
“You’re sitting at the bank, and they say,
‘Who’s been eating doughnuts?’” Murphy says.
Q&A with Suzanne Johnson, senior flavor chemist
at Mother Murphy’s, who specializes in bakery, dairy
and candy flavors.
O.Henry: What does a flavor scientist do?
Suzanne Johnson: We try to take the chemicals
that are naturally in a food and put those together in
a concentrated form so they give the taste we’re trying to create. If you’re eating an apple, for example,
it’s going have a certain amount of water, a certain
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Gate City Icon
amount of sugar, a certain amount of acid, but the apple also has created a lot of
esters and aldehydes and aroma chemicals that make it taste like an apple. Our
job is to know what those are and put them together in the right proportions.
O.H.: It sounds like a lot of chemistry.
S.J.: It is. But to me, it’s almost fifty-fifty creativity and chemistry. Two
different chemists could make an apple flavor, and the average person
would say, ‘Oh yeah, they’re both apple,’ but
they’d be slightly different. That’s where the
creativity comes in. You want it to be hard to
duplicate. So you might put some essential oil
in there at a low level to give it just a nuance.
O.H.: So you have to have a discerning nose
— or is it palate?
S.J.: Both, but nose more predominantly
because most of your taste is smell. People
think you have taste buds only in your mouth,
but you also have retro-nasal tasting. When
something is in your mouth, it’s also going up into your nose. That’s why
when you have a cold, you can’t really taste things.
O.H.: Do most flavor chemists have a chemistry background?
S.J.: Yes. I have a major in biology and a minor in chemistry. You have to have a
background in sciences and decent math skills. From there, it’s on-the-job training. You have to train with a flavor chemist for five years, then pass a written
and an oral test. If you pass those tests and have the recommendation of your

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

mentor, you’re called a junior flavorist by the Society of Flavor Chemistry.
O.H.: Are you a flavor snob? Would you taste a cookie or a coffee and go,
“Blech!” or “That’s really good!”
S.J.: Yeah, I’ll often say, “Wow, kudos to whoever did that one.” And one
thing I don’t compromise — I always buy good vanillas. Yeah, it matters to me.
O.H.: Why do some of your customers want
to keep their flavors secret?
S.J.: I’ll put it this way: What distinguishes
one product from another is not always anything major. For baked products, they’re using
flour and butter or shortening or whatever,
and a lot of times the thing that gives them
their distinctive taste is the flavor, so that’s the
thing they really don’t want anyone else to get.
They want it custom-made for them, so (for example) we have thousands of vanillas. To the
average person it would all seem like vanilla,
but they’re all different, and they may perform differently in the product. It’s
all trade secrets. You don’t patent flavors because once you patent a flavor,
then you have to publish it.
O.H.: What’s the most unusual flavor you’ve ever worked on?
S.J.: Back in the ’80s, we did a line of alcohol flavors for toothpaste. I thought,
“Who wants to have gin-flavored toothpaste? Why would you want people to
think you’d been drinking?” They didn’t buy much. Big surprise. OH

April 2013

O.Henry 39

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The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The Sporting Life

Life, Death and
Rebirth at Slim’s
Spring cometh again with daffodils by the shed

By Tom Bryant

It was time. After three solid days of rain,
along with the damp cold that seeps into the bones, I was
going cabin crazy. I had to do something. Writing was no
good. The muse left when the bad weather came. I would
sit up in the roost, the little garage apartment where I do
my creative stuff, and just stare out the window at the
miserable, soggy, frigid weather. I would have loved to see
the rain just a month earlier, at the height of duck season.
Now it was worthless. Insult added to injury as I was still
getting over the upper respiratory crud that had afflicted
so many across the country. Point of fact, as another sneezing fit racked my miserable bones, I hated February and
was looking forward to spring.
There was only one thing to do and that was ride up to Slim’s old country
store and see if any of the regulars were about. Slim was no longer with us,
going the way of several of my friends in the past couple of years. As I backed
the Bronco out of the garage, I thought how every passing day emphasizes our
mortality. Too many friends have died recently. I went in the house to tell Linda
where I was going. I think she was a little relieved to see that finally I had something to do. I’m afraid my restlessness had affected her mood.
“You be careful,” she said. “Why are you driving the Bronco? You know it
leaks. Take the Cruiser. It’s safer.”
“Nah,” I replied. “The Bronco needs to get out, too. We’re both about to
go bonkers.”
“I believe it, especially when you start talking about that truck like it’s
alive. Tell Bubba I said hey, and you get home in time for supper. Don’t
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

forget your phone.”
Bubba and I have been friends forever, it seems. Fortunately for the regulars who frequent Slim’s old store, Bubba bought the place after Slim died.
To keep it open, he hired Leroy, Slim’s cousin, to run it for him. We would
still have a place to go, as Bubba so eloquently put it, where the idiot television box couldn’t intrude. Bubba hates TV and cell phones. He claims that
the latest craze, the smart phone, is an oxymoron. When you’re at Slim’s
Country Store, you leave that cell phone in your vehicle. If you don’t and it
rings, he will banish you from the place.
There is a story about Bubba that I know to be true. One early spring day
when the newly nesting birds were singing and bream were beginning to bed,
Bubba and a friend of his, who was also his investment counselor, were in a
small boat fishing at the pond at the Alamance Wildlife Club. The friend’s
cell phone rang. Now the phone was in a jacket on the middle seat of the boat.
Bubba picked up the jacket, retrieved the phone, and tossed the still ringing
instrument into the lake. He didn’t say a word, just kept fishing as his friend, the
stockbroker, sat in the boat wide-eyed.
The ride up to the ancient store was uneventful with the exception of my
having to constantly wipe the inside of the front windscreen where rivulets of
rainwater seeped. I should have listened to Linda, I thought as I was nearing
Slim’s place. The old Bronco has become a fair weather vehicle.
“Happens to all of us,” I said aloud, not wanting to hurt the old vehicle’s feelings. “Man, I’ve got to get around people more. I’m talking to things.”
I pulled into the gravel parking lot at Slim’s, dodged mud puddles, and came
to a soggy halt. I dragged an old canvas tarp out of the back of the truck and
draped it over the top just as Bubba came out on the porch and hollered through
the wind-driven rain at me. “Get on in here out o’ the rain, boy. You look like a
drowned muskrat.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “I feel like one too. Linda’s gonna kill me if I have a relapse
with this crud. How you doing, Bubba?”
“I’m doing a lot better than you, it looks like. Come on in by the stove. Leroy
just put in a fresh load of hickory.”
The potbelly stove sat catty-corner in the store and was glowing red from
Leroy’s latest load of aged firewood. Four slat-back straight chairs were in a semiApril 2013

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April 2013

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The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The Sporting Life
circle around the blazing fire. I was surprised to see
that I was the only one in the place. Even Leroy
seemed to be missing. “Where is everybody?”
“Leroy had to run home for a while, so I told him
I’d look out for things while he’s gone. The rest of
the crowd kinda drifts in and out. Get some coffee.”
I poured myself a mug and sat down by the fire.
Bubba moved one of the chairs and dragged over
his favorite rocker. “You look kinda beat, boy,” he
said as he took a sip of his coffee. “Things been
rough down your way?”
“Not too good, Bubba, what with all the sickness
and people up and dying on us. You heard about
Blue, I guess?” Cliff Blue, a longtime friend, had
recently passed away, suffering from heart disease.
“That was a shocker,” Bubba replied. “But you
know, really it wasn’t. We’re getting old Tom. I
read that Clifton was 72, no spring chicken just
like the rest of us.”
“You’re right, but it’s still not easy to accept. You
sorta wonder where the time went.”
We sat silently for a bit, watching the fire as it
flickered through the glass on the door of the stove.
Bubba got up and went to the drink box behind the
counter. He came back with a flask. “Hold out your
cup, Buddy Roe.”
He poured in a big shot of an amber liquid.
“This brandy will warm you up and make you feel
better. Come on back here. I want to show you
something.” We walked to the back of the store.
“Look out there.”
Bubba pointed, and through the plate glass
window at the back of the old place, I saw a clump
of blooming daffodils. They were in the lee of the
wind right next to the shed where Slim had kept his
1940 John Deere tractor.
“Aren’t they pretty?” Bubba asked. “I watched
Slim plant those things — just a few — when he
put them in the ground, but they come back more
and more every year. Every time I’m at the store, I
come back here to see if they’re still blooming. If you
think about it, everything is relative. Those flowers
are here just a little bit, but they sure are beautiful
while they’re blooming. Then you turn around and
they’re gone. But you know they’ll be back next
year, bigger and better. Could be we’re a lot like
those flowers — here today, gone in a little while,
only to come back even better than before.”
I looked at the little clump of flowers as Bubba
headed back to the fire. I felt better. It could have
been Bubba’s homespun philosophy that helped or
more likely the dollop of brown whiskey he poured
into my coffee cup. Whatever, I’ll take it. OH
Tom Bryant, who graduated from Elon and lived in
Alamance County for decades, is a
lifelong outdoorsman and O.Henry’s
Sporting Life columnist.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

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44 O.Henry

April 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Life of Jane

Watching Over Roger
Wildlife comes and goes, even in a small rural plot

By Jane Borden

Comparing our

Illustration by Meridith Martens

individual personalities to the
general behavior of cats and
dogs is an American pastime. Or Western, I suppose.
Surely humans have always played
the game of “Which Domesticated
Animal Are You?” Today, someone
in Ohio may postulate, “Carrie is a
hugger; she’s a dog. But you must give David time to
warm up — what a cat.” In 1521, a member of the Incan
empire might have opined, “Chic’ya would jump in your
hands to be cooked and eaten; she’s trusting like a guinea pig. But Inti Cusi Huallpa, he is more a llama: Consider how much weight he carries without going bald!”
When given only feline and canine options, my animalization is clearly dog.
I’m eager to please and regularly knock vases off tables when excited. While on a
mission, I’m blissfully unaware of anything else. This was a boon while living in
New York City, where minimizing focus on the majority of one’s surroundings,
such as piles of trash bags and packs of rats, is a psychological-survival necessity.
But my current home in the woods of Tennessee is coy.
Participation requires keen, patient and catlike awareness. I’ve adapted.
For example, I regularly sit stock still by our glass door waiting for Roger, the
chipmunk in our backyard, to forget that I am not a piece of furniture and
resume his business.
Roger either lives or stores nuts in the woodpile by our back
stairs. Sometimes he scampers across the patio with cheeks bulging.
Sometimes he perches on hind legs, snacking with front paws. I believe the
scientific term is adorable. I keep a spare pair of Roger-Watching Glasses
hanging by the door, as to always be prepared. (I should say that, although I
get close, I’m not that close, i.e., he may be a she.)
We also come across stick-bugs, which are insects that, you may have
guessed, look remarkably like sticks. I discovered them when a twig would not
be brushed off my bike. Leaning down, I saw its tiny legs holding on. Hell of a
camouflage, I thought, and vowed to be more like the stick-bug, lest Roger find
me out and warn his friends about furniture-people.
I gingerly removed the insect and placed it on the ground, hoping to disturb
its plan as little as possible.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Generally, I subscribe to an
isolationist approach. A tiny
oak tree is currently growing
inside one of our potted
plants. But, once, I deviated.
On a sunny morning, after
removing my bicycle cover, I
discovered minuscule wood
shavings covering the vehicle,
and traced them to a thumbsized hole newly bored into the
wooden partition separating our
small backyard from the abutting
townhouse’s. I peered inside, heard a
buzzing, and jumped back before the holesized bee climbed out and flew away. Suddenly seeing
an image of me, a few mornings later, pulling up the bike tarp and meeting a
swarm of adolescent stingers, I procured a piece of duct tape, ensured the nest
was still vacant and covered the hole. Several times through the day, I saw
the frantic insect flying the length of the wall, seeking the hole, trying again
and again to get in. How could I have been sure she hadn’t laid her eggs yet? I
wondered if intervention had been warranted, if I shouldn’t have found a new
station for my bike instead. After all, I am bee-like, laboring to make a home in
these strange and inhospitable woods.
A year after we began our rural adventure, new neighbors moved in next
door, and I found a different and even more alien creature on the other side
of the glass door: a small white and spotted terrier. Cookie’s extendable leash
allows her to wander deep into the trees directly behind her owners’ yard, or
to cut back at the edge of the wooden partition and explore the entirety of our
small, carefully uncultivated plot.
She sticks her nose in holes or under leaves, barks wantonly, and urinates
where she pleases. After a few weeks, I gingerly suggested that Cookie might be
deterred from our patio area and our neighbor replied, “Oh, isn’t it funny how
she loves it? I think there’s a chipmunk or something in the woodpile because I
can’t keep her away!”
“Yes,” I said. “There is,” I said.
That’s Roger, I thought to myself. Leave him alone, I thought, realizing it
had been days since we’d spied him hopping about, even though it was still
quite warm outside. I wandered around the dozen or so square feet behind
our townhouse and didn’t see much of anything, in fact. It appears that, under
Cookie’s haphazard policing, our backyard has become a monoculture of fauna,
a society of Cookie. It’s very human of her. OH
Jane Borden is a native of Greensboro and the author of the highlyacclaimed memoir, I Totally Meant To Do That.

“It is difficult/to get the news from poems/
yet men die miserably every day/
for lack/ of what is found there.” – W.C.Williams

What if Emily Dickinson was wrong . . .

and there were no feathers —
only accidental hollows holding hope interrupted,
hidden debris of bare wings, a bruised insufficiency?

Emily would have a lot to answer for in that case,
except poetry’s sufficiency elides that whole
answer (dare I say hoped-for?) imperative

preferring, instead, to plume itself sometimes
in the hard raptures of reasonless flight, the
airy real estate of both poet and metaphor

that gives ground to the unsayable.

— Connie Ralston

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

April 2013

O.Henry 47

Anne of a Thousand Days

By Jim Schlosser

T

alk about a fish
out of water,
that’s Reid
Stowe.
He, his
girlfriend, Soanya Ahnad,
and their 4 1/2-year-old son,
Darshen, find themselves landlocked on Montpelier Drive
in Greensboro, two hundred
miles from Stowe’s schooner,
Anne, which is docked in downtown Wilmington.
Stowe was born to be at sea,
far at sea, and in solitude.
He holds the world’s record
for most consecutive days spent
at sea without resupplying,
touching any ports, or seeing
land — 1,152 days aboard Anne,
the 70-foot, two-masted vessel
he built with help from his father and friends from 1976–78
at Ocean Isle Beach on North
Carolina’s coast. In the early
1990s while guiding the Anne in Antarctica waters, he decided he would
eventually stretch his trip into a thousand-day journey to break the 657-day
record of sailing without coming within sight of land.
It then took him fifteen years of seeking sponsors to equip the Anne with
enough essentials to last at least four years. He sought donations through a
web site, 1000days.net, which remains active with Reid’s and Ahnad’s latest
exploits. While he sought support, he made a few dollars in New York City
taking people on charter boat rides and selling his artwork.
In 2005 while preparing to set off on his thousand-day voyage, he met
Ahnad, a native of Guyana about to graduate in photography from the City
College of New York. She loved roaming the piers of New York’s waterfront
taking photos. Spotting Stowe, she asked to take pictures of his boat. When
she kept returning for more shots, he asked her if she wanted to go sailing.

48

April 2013

Little by little she got hooked
on the sport and began taking
courses on sailing techniques at
a community college, eventually
earning an associate degree in
maritime technology.
Eventually, a person who was
supposed to accompany Reid on
his voyage dropped out. Ahnad
volunteered to substitute. She
moved aboard the Anne. Within
a week she and Reid were “a
couple.” He was 55, she 23. Her
parents were outraged.
“Yeah, I can do it,” she
remembers telling herself about
the challenge ahead. “I didn’t
have any obligations.”
At last, on April 16, 2007,
Stowe and Ahnad set out from
Hoboken, New Jersey. About
fourteen days later, far off the
New Jersey coast, the Anne collided with a container ship. The
Anne’s bowsprit, essential for
navigation, was heavily damaged.
Stowe managed to make repairs
without returning to land, but his jerry-rigging wasn’t a match for the original
bowsprit. Essentially, he says, he was forced to make the rest of the voyage in a
disabled boat.
Ahnad remained with Stowe for 306 days until she became ill and had
to be evacuated by helicopter off the Australian coast. The ailment turned
out to be morning sickness. She was pregnant with Darshen. Still, she
was aboard long enough to set the record for sailing longer than any other
woman without seeing land.
Stowe sailed on alone for two more years. After meeting his 1,000-day
goal on January 16, 2010, he was far from home and faced bad weather. It
took him another 152 days to reach New York. He says if not for family obligations, he would have remained at sea longer. He liked it that much.
When he finally returned home, June 17, 2010, The New York Times, The
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Photograph by Sam Froelich

The man who set the world record for consecutive days
at sea without seeing land is a family man at home — for now

Photographs from Reid Stowe

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

April 2013

O.Henry 49

New York Post, the New York Daily News, the Associated Press and Reuters
greeted him at Pier 81 in Manhattan. Reporters from Germany and France
flew in for the occasion. He looked up at the crowd and saw Ahnad and, for
the first time, his son, Darshen. Reid’s parents, Harry and Anne Stowe of
Greensboro, stood cheering. The schooner is named for Anne Stowe.
The Post’s headline summed up the occasion nicely: “Land ho, baby.”
New York magazine did a feature story on Reid. The New Yorker mentioned
it. The Associated Press wired stories to newspapers across the nation.
Since then there’s been little publicity.
“A French reporter told me that if I were a Frenchman I’d be a national
hero with a ticker tape parade in my honor,” says Stowe, now 61, standing
in his father’s house surrounded by canvases painted during the voyage.
Fifteen of his paintings are on display at The George on the Riverwalk, a
restaurant in Wilmington, not far from where Anne is docked.

D

ennis Chamberland, an aquanaut who’s worked on fourteen
seafloor missions as mission commander of the Atlantica
Undersea Colony, proclaimed, “One thousand years from
now, Reid Stowe’s record will still probably remain unbroken.”
Reid agrees, declaring, “No one has the practical experience to accomplish what we accomplished.”
Carter Craft, a Greensboro native who now lives in Hoboken, is a long-time
friend of Stowe’s and was present for his April, 2007, launch. “He had back-ups
to the back-up systems,” Carter said, amazed at Stowe’s preparations.
Stowe and Ahnad will be landlubbers for some time. His mother died
last August, leaving her husband of 60 years alone in the house they had
shared for thirty-eight years ever since Col. Harry Stowe’s retirement from
the Air Force. Reid says his 83-year-old father’s health is good, but he
has become more forgetful lately. Stowe says he felt obligated to move to
Greensboro to care for him rather than move him to a rest home.
“It is a very big adjustment for us,” he says. “It is nice to be in the family
home with Dad, but being on land after a life of adventure at sea, we still
feel a little bit out of our element.”
Other than the Anne, if any place comes close to being Reid Stowe’s
home, it’s the house on Montpelier. He was already grown and sailing the
seas when his North Carolina-born parents moved there. Between adven-

50 O.Henry

April 2013

tures he would drop in for visits, once staying six months while teaching
yoga. His quests date back to the 1970s, when he set the record for the
smallest boat to cross the Atlantic — twice — a 28-foot catamaran. In the
early 1990s, he did a 194-day expedition on the Anne to Antarctica.
Born in Washington state, his traveling days started early as the family
moved from post to post throughout the nation and overseas while his dad
was in the Air Force. Reid Stowe’s maternal grandparents, however, had a
place at Ocean Isle Beach, where he fell in love with things oceanic. With
help from his father and others, that’s where Stowe built his record-setters,
the catamaran and the Anne.
Today, except for trips to Wilmington every two or three weeks, about
the only water Stowe sees larger than a bathtub-full is when he, Ahnad and
Darshen walk with his father a few blocks to Lake Hamilton, the centerpiece of the Hamilton Lakes neighborhood.
Thinking of her time at sea, Soanya Ahnad says she was never bored
and only became frightened when the boat hit the container ship and she
watched as the sail was blown to tatters.
“But there are different levels of scared,” she says. “Most of the time you
knew you would get through it.” That’s because of her faith in the ship’s
captain: “I knew he knew every inch of that boat. Everything was well
within his capabilities.”
They frequently saw whales and dolphins. The flying fish that landed
on the boat became lunch and dinner. They watched albatrosses, a solitary
bird, who like Stowe, prefers to be far out in the ocean.
A GPS tracking system monitored the Anne’s movements. The only link
he and Ahnad had to the outside world was a satellite phone over which
they sent and received emails. People throughout the nation monitored the
voyage through their web site.
Ahnad keeps the web site supplied with photos from the boat and now
from land. Even though she had to leave the Anne, make no mistake, says
Stowe, “She was an integral part of this voyage.”
They want to include their story in a book Stowe is writing. Surprisingly,
publishers he’s approached so far have shown no interest. One editor put
it bluntly: He didn’t like Stowe and predicted readers wouldn’t either. The
editor was angry Stowe didn’t terminate the voyage once he learned Ahnad
was pregnant.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Photograph by Sam Froelich

“I started getting hate mail from people because I wasn’t taking on my
fatherly responsibilities,” Stowe says.
Ahnad defends Reid’s decision not to end the voyage. “The baby was not
old enough to know his daddy. It was a good time for him to be away.”
Reid points out that when he was born, his father was serving in Korea.
Stowe doesn’t remember anything about his absence.
Alone, Stowe stayed busy with the chores on the boat, the hardest task
being repairing torn sails. The boat once capsized in a storm, knocking
Stowe out cold. Water rushing inside the cabin revived him. The heavy
ballast boat righted itself, repairs were made and Stowe kept going. On day
658, Stowe broke the record of days at sea without sight of land. When he
reached the 1,000 days target in January of 2010, he says he was too busy to
get emotional. Besides, he felt he was slipping into a state of timelessness.
Stowe says he had been depressed after Ahnad’s departure, knowing he
faced two years of sailing alone. But by the last year of the voyage, Stowe
says, “I entered into a state of grace.” He prayed and eventually “I felt that
now I was being shown the way and that I was being looked after.” This
state of grace “took away any fears,” he says, “and gave me confidence I was
going to make it.”
Once back in New York, Stowe basked in the excitement and publicity.
But negative thoughts, which had been absent during the voyage, returned.
He realized he had two people to support. Their only home was the Anne.
Where will his next buck come from, he asked himself.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

“I entered into a very different state of mind than when I was at sea,” he
says. “Right now we are in a temporary state without security for the future.”
Stowe plans to persist with his book. And he would love to see a movie
made of the adventure.
He has always had a knack of getting things by boldly asking for them.
Scores of contributors reacted to his emails for donations before and
during the voyage. His boat was allowed to dock free in New York while
he raised money and materials. It now has free dockage at The George in
Wilmington. The owner thought it would be good for business to have a
history-making boat out front.
Stowe has been married before. From a previous marriage, he has a
34-year-old daughter, a lawyer in California. Now the question in the minds
of people who know Stowe and Ahnad: Will they ever tie a knot other than
one on a boat?
“We do intend to get married,” Stowe says, “but we haven’t set a date or
know how we are going to do it.”
He says Ahnad loves sailing “and the day will come when we go back to
sea, though not trying anything like we did before.”
In other words, he plans to play it safer and not let his sailing obsession
ruin another relationship. One of his former wives has been quoted as saying, “I love Reid, but he is a fish and I am not.” OH
Jim Schlosser is a regular contributing editor of O.Henry magazine.
April 2013

O.Henry 51

52

April 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Scallion
Fiction by Fred Chappell • Illustration by Harry Blair

“I

have been reading a magazine,” Mary Ellen said.
“Huh-oh,” her father said.
“That’s interesting,” said her mother. “What was it about?”
“Food. The article said we are not eating a proper diet. Too many hamburgers. Not enough lettuce and broccoli and all kinds of greens.”
“Your father likes hamburgers.”
“My name is Eric Ackerman, not Benjamin Bunny,” he said. “I need to keep
up my strength to carry books. You’d be surprised how heavy a box of books
can be and we sell a lot of them at Barnes & Noble.”
“The article said that spinach makes us strong,” Mary Ellen said.
“You must have been reading Popeye Magazine,” her father said. He flexed his
biceps to illustrate, but he was wearing a dingy T-shirt and the overhead light of
the dinky, small kitchen did not flatter his physique.
“It was called Smart Health. Don’t you want to be healthy?”
“Yes — as long as I can do smart health on hamburgers.”
“We could have spinach burgers. I’ll look for a recipe.”
“Oh Lord. Is this another of your missions? A dietary missionary project? Are
we going to suffer long debates and wind up eating horrible-tasting food?”
“I wouldn’t know how to cook spinach burgers,” her mother said. “Do you
fry them like the regular ones or broil or sauté?”
“I don’t know yet,” Mary Ellen said. “I will have to read some more.”
“How is your schoolwork? Will you make all A’s again?” she asked.
“I don’t like Language Skills. Language Skills is dumb. ‘As white as snow.’ By
the end of the day, snow is dirty and sloppy. It should be, ‘As white as the white
of a boiled egg.’”
“It should be Language Skills are dumb,” Mr. Ackerman said. “That would
be the correct grammar.”
“Grammar are dumb too,” Mary Ellen said. “And I expect kale would be
better. A nice, thick, juicy kale burger. It makes my mouth water just to think
about it.”
“It makes my eyes water,” he said. “If I have to eat kale burgers, I will weep
like . . . like a . . . what would they say in your Language Skills class that I would
weep like?”
“They don’t say weep. You would cry. Like a baby. That’s what Language
Skills makes you say. Anyhow, you would like burgers made of good kale and not
the supermarket kind. We could grow our own.”
“What Language Skills make you say. Grammar is important.”
“Not to me. I made all A’s, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” her father said. “Your mother and I are very proud.” But his
tone sounded dismal, like that of a meek youngster sentenced to Sunday school
for a decade without parole.

M

ary Ellen had a propensity to attach to personal ambitions without
being able to formulate clear reasons, even to herself. She was
sketching an unclear scheme to become a vegetarian, although she
was not passionate to eat veggies, especially carrots, which in her eyes were of
a color a little vulgar, too much like school buses. And carrot-orange did not fit
well with her red hair. When she pictured herself with a carrot protruding from
her mouth, she looked like one of those dreadful plastic jack-o’-lanterns that got
remaindered after Halloween.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Eggplant was enrobed in a lovely, dark, smooth purple, but when you peeled
it, the flesh was the same color as apples, onions, and light bread. Disappointing.
Other vegetables had important drawbacks too.
She probably had thought of becoming a vegetarian because she liked the
sound of the word. Anybody could be a writer or a shortstop or a preacher, but
it required five nimble syllables to enunciate the title, Vegetarian. You gained
importance when you yoked yourself to the term. If she had ever heard the word
utilitarian, she might have kissed vegetables goodbye. “I used to be a vegetarian,”
she would tell her utilitarian buddies, “but I grew out of that.”
For a 14-year-old, Mary Ellen was worldly-wise. When she got a little older,
she would have a horse. That particular happiness was written in the stars, she
told her schoolmates. Now that she was a vegetarian, she would name the horse
Scallion and not Lost Vegas. He would be a vegetarian too.
But where was she going to situate her kale garden? The grounds of the housing project called Diaper Hill by nonresidents were covered with scraggy grass
that revealed patches of red clay like scabs on knees and elbows. Even if she tried
to dig in that earth as hard as terra cotta, it would never yield produce. And if it
did, people would steal it or yank it up for sport.
Her friend Merla claimed an uncle who owned a farm. He might let her have
a little spot to plant, but she would have no way to travel to it. Too bad. Merla’s
Uncle Haskin could teach her how to farm her plot of kale. Mary Ellen wasn’t
certain how to begin the task.
She would need implements. A hoe and a watering can and bib overalls and
a straw hat to shade her eyes and a red bandanna to pull from her back pocket
and wipe her forehead.
And fertilizer. Plants must be fed, she knew. When she acquired her stallion
Scallion she would have lots of fertilizer, but that would be years from now. She
had been saving up five-dollar bills in a big envelope marked Lost Vegas, but she
had amassed only thirty dollars. “A thousand years,” she said. “It will take ten
thousand years.”
Yet even when she was discouraged, she never gave up. Every problem has
a solution. The trouble now was that there was a bunch of problems tangled
together in a tight knot.
Money was the most difficult of the lot, so she started working on that aspect
and developed a plan.

H

er mother owned three cookbooks that she kept stacked on the
Formica counter beside the sink drain board. They were a shabby
trio with spavined spines, pages soiled with sauces and wrinkled
with water stains, pages missing. One was a Rombauer Joy of Cooking purchased
at a yard sale. Certain pages of desserts had been ripped out. A collection of
health-food recipes called Mother Earth Loves You sported covers painted over
with Day-Glo pink and green. “A hippy heap of horse manure,” her father
described it, not saying manure. The third volume was titled Fine Wine Cuisine.
It looked like it had never been opened.
Mary Ellen paged through the first two books inattentively, having decided
beforehand to concentrate on the recipes that were to accompany beatific bordeaux and marvelous margaux. She was determined that her cooking had to be
different from her mother’s. Her mother could never conceive of inventing the
kale burger, of keeping secret the ingredients that would make it so wonderfully
April 2013

O.Henry 53

savory, and then selling the recipe to restaurant owners for barrels of money.
Mary Ellen only needed one sale to start with and soon afterward word would
get around. “Kale burger sweeps the nation”— the newspaper headline read, as
it emerged in her mind. She envisioned the accompanying sidebar in which a
famous movie star revealed her favorite version of the kale burger.
As she read the cookbooks, she made a list of the elements she must procure.
Kale, of course, was paramount. And bread. She decided it ought to be some sort
of cornbread hamburger bun — for the rustic touch. A number of families in the
project ate black-eyed peas and collards. She could boil up some peas or get them
in a can and mash them up and mix them with her kale and make a patty. Kale
was green, as were collards, so she figured they would taste pretty much the same.
On hamburgers we smear mustard and squirt ketchup, but these did not
seem to go with kale. The colors were wrong and she couldn’t taste the combinations in her mind. There were no recipes for kale in Fine Wine Cuisine, but she
found a spinach salad that called for vinaigrette classique. She did not know
what a vinaigrette was. For that matter, she did not know what cuisine meant.
But she was content to go forward on the strength of faith alone.
The ingredients for the vinaigrette dressing were two different vinegars, “fine
sea salt to taste,” and a cup of expensive olive oil. “Extra virgin” must mean
costly. She would make do with cider vinegar, Mazola corn oil, and Morton’s
iodized salt.
I have to start somewhere, she thought. Nobody will be able to tell the
difference.
All the main dishes in the book were cooked with wines: medoc, beaujolais,
cabernet franc, and other unpronounceables. There was no wine in the apartment. Her father often kept a few cans of what he called PBR in the cramped
refrigerator. Wine and beer must be about the same, Mary Ellen deduced,
because people drank both to get drunk. She would use PBR, if she could figure
out how to snitch one.
Now she was ready to prepare to begin to get ready.

M

ary Ellen was deeply sorrowed to remove a five-dollar bill from
the envelope marked Lost Vegas. Five dollars represented the
savings of a whole week. But if she didn’t obtain ingredients, she
could not experiment with them and her famous secret recipe would never
come into existence.
In the little grocery store across the broad street from Drummond Heights
— as a sign bewildered with graffiti named her neighborhood — she found no
kale. She knew the storekeeper, a thin, gloomy, unhurried man everyone but
Mary Ellen called Jacklight. She called him Mr. Ponder because he took so long
to think when you asked him a question. The store was small, dimly lit, and the
shelves were sparsely stocked. When you asked for condensed milk or orange
juice, he ambled to the correct space and handed it to you only after you had
paid for it. Even then he seemed reluctant to let it go.
“Kale?” he said. His voice was light and whispery. “The Joyful Sunrise
Grocery Emporium cannot afford to stock fresh greens. They do not last
long on the shelf and nobody likes fresh greens. They like meat. They like
hamburger meat.”
“I am a vegetarian,” Mary Ellen said.
Mr. Ponder blinked and began to examine Mary Ellen as if he thought
her flying saucer had carelessly departed without her. “No kale,” he said. “No
greens fresh.”
“What else have you got that I might be able to use?”
A ponderous silence ensued.
“Well, maybe,” he said at last. “Come over here.” She followed him into the
third of the four aisles and he knelt and retrieved a can from a bottom shelf. As
he stood, he brushed dust from the top of the can with the elbow of his sweatshirt. “Spinach,” he said.
“Is it like kale?”
“Not much.”
The front door opened and a man with pointed tufts of hair on his head
called out. “Hey, Jacklight, did my special order come in?”
Mr. Ponder regarded him with mild interest. “No.”

54

April 2013

“I’ll try again later.” The tufty man left.
“What is his special order?” Mary Ellen asked.
“He thinks I sell dope,” Mr. Ponder said.
“Everybody thinks so.”
“Well . . .” It took a while before he said, “Grass.”
“You sell marijuana?”
“If you took this can of spinach and drained it real good and found you a
patch of fresh green grass in somebody’s yard and cut you some and chopped it
up real fine and mixed it with the spinach, it might taste something like kale. A
little bit.”
“Are you sure it would work?”
His eyes upon her upturned face were pensive. “I am sure of nothing. This
world is no place to be sure about anything.”
His sad tone saddened Mary Ellen. “Can you keep a secret?” she asked.
“Most of the time. Have you committed a criminal act?”
“I am trying to invent a kale burger,” she said. “I want to keep the recipe a
secret so I can sell it to make money to buy Scallion.”
“Scallions don’t cost a whole lot. I can get you some for free.”
“Scallion is the name of the horse. When I get him.”
An age passed.
“If you’re going to try to shape a hamburger patty, you’ll need something
besides greens or it won’t hold together.”
“I thought about black-eyed peas. All mushed up. Salt and pepper. On a
cornbread bun.”
“You better stick to regular buns. I can tell you never made cornbread.”
“How?”
“The way you talk, words you say. But I have lots of cans of black-eyed peas.
That is a mover. Most of the brands have hog fat in them. You don’t want that.”
“What words?”
“Vegetarian. People that make cornbread don’t say vegetarian. But you could
use corn meal to kind of help paste it together.”
“How much do black-eyed peas cost?”
“If you’ll take that can of spinach off my hands, I’ll give you a deal on a
can of peas.”
“How long has the spinach been here?”
“Since before you were born.”
“Are you sure it’s still good?”
She regretted her question immediately. The universe took another leisurely
turn before he said, “I am sure of nothing.”
“Thank you very much.” She paid, ruefully, and left.

N

ext morning, after her father had gone to his work at Barnes &
Noble, the labor he described as “toting Pattersons,” Mary Ellen
shooed her mother out of the kitchen, announcing that she was on
the verge of a cookery breakthrough. She couldn’t allow anyone looking over her
shoulder, she explained, because that would make her nervous and might cause
a misstep.
“All right,” her mother said. “Genius at work. I won’t get in your way.”
So Mary Ellen went to the closet of her tiny bedroom, took up the cardboard
box of ingredients, and lugged it to the kitchen. Before she opened it, she crossed
to the vertical row of shelves that served as a pantry and took down an apron
hanging there from a hook. It was the “Kiss the ook” garment that she hated
with a passion so deadly that, given rein and means, it might wipe out the population of a medium-sized middle European nation. She tied it on with a pitiful
sigh and laid out her elements on the counter.
A plastic bag of ordinary hamburger buns $1.37.
An ancient can of boiled spinach $1.50.
A newish can of black-eyed peas $0.50.
Six ounces of cornmeal in a business-letter envelope $0.10.
A double handful of fairly green grass $0.00.
Total outlay: $3.47. It sorrowed her so much to break the five-dollar bill that
was supposed to help purchase Scallion that she placed the remaining $1.53 into
her underwear drawer instead of the equestrienne envelope.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

These expenses were curious. Mr. Ponder had first charged her $1.50 for the
peas. When she objected, he lowered the price to fifty cents and raised the price
of the spinach by a dollar. When she declared that this sort of pricing made no
sense, he agreed and with a sad, unhurried smile, refused to change his prices.
So she stopped dickering. Mr. Ponder was not dickerable.
The grass entailed no expense except for the dulling of the pinking shears
from her mother’s sewing kit. She had cleaned the scissors and restored them
in place and now she washed the grass blades thoroughly in cold water. She had
found a patch of grass behind a maintenance shed on the grounds of the project
and she was certain that dogs and drunken boys had peed on it.
After she washed the grass she washed it again and pressed it mostly dry.
When she opened the can of spinach she did not like the smell, so she drained
the clump and washed it too. She chopped the grass as finely as she could with
the dull butcher knife and mixed in the spinach. She poured the envelope of
cornmeal in and looked for beer. Her dad must have used up the PBR, but the
label of a bottle tweaked her attention. Red Wine Vinegar. This must be a kind
of wine, she thought, pouring a strong half cup into the yellow mixing bowl with
the greenery and cornmeal.
Now what?
Salt and pepper and something called meat tenderizer and corn oil, all stirred
together to compose a greenish-blacking murky mush that closely resembled the
flop from a distressed bovine. She dared herself to taste it and failed.
“It will look better when it is cooked,” she said.
In a pan on a front eye of the small electric stove she melted butter, not
measuring. Then she scooped up a handful of the mush and tried to make a
patty, but it was too wet. She held the lump over the sink and squeezed. Then it
was too thin so she put a cup of flour on a plate and smoothed out the lump and
floured it liberally. Finally she had something shaped like a patty.
Wiping her hands on the pink apron, she stepped back from the plate to
judge her handiwork and found it passable. She plopped it into the bubbling butter. It didn’t sizzle the way she had imagined that a regulation kale burger would;
it made a sort of guttural moan and oozed juices.
In three minutes it stopped oozing and she flipped it over. The upper side
was black. As black as ink? “There is red ink and purple ink and green and blue,”
she said aloud. “It should be, ‘As black as the space behind your eyeballs.’”
Black enough to look unappetizing.
But she soldiered on and let the patty tremble in the butter which had now
turned a surprising purple-green color, something like the shade of a shoe polish
rejected by the manufacturer. She opened the package of buns and smeared one
with mustard. “Why don’t we have any ketchup?” she complained.
When she lifted the patty from the pan it dripped liquid, so she laid it on
the financial section of the newspaper which lay on the dinette table where her
father had left it. In a few moments the paper was sopping, but the patty had
dried enough to transfer to the bun. Before she did so, she cut off a little sliver at
the edge and chewed and at last managed to swallow.
She did not like the taste one little bit.
“How can vegetarians eat this stuff?” she said.
Then she turned it over again and laid it on the bread. “We have to make a
start somewhere. This is the experimental model.” She would try it out on her
father at supper.

H

e sat waiting at the table when she entered the kitchen. “My oh my,”
he said. “You’re all dressed up. What’s the occasion?”
Mary Ellen had exchanged her tan cotton shorts and soiled white
shirt and flip-flops for clean blue jeans, a pleated blouse, and red-and-white
sneakers. She had wanted to wear a flowery apron, but there was none and
nothing in this whole starry galaxy would induce her to don the pink “ook”
apron again.
“I am introducing a new kooey-sign,” she said. “So I dressed up for it.”
“Kooey-sign?”
“I think Mary Ellen means cuisine,” her mother said. She too had freshened
her outfit. “I saw the book open on the counter, Fine Wine Cuisine.”
“This is something to look forward to,” her father said. “What is it?”
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

She brought the large red soup pot from the counter to the table, removed the
lid, and took out a small plate holding her creation, and set it before him.
“Ta-da!” her mother caroled.
He leaned toward it, then leaned back from it. “What do we have here?”
“It’s a new kind of burger,” Mary Ellen said.
“What’s in it?”
“I don’t want to say. I want to keep it a secret till I sell it to restaurants and
burger palaces. If you like it, they will pay me money to know the recipe.”
“Is it some kind of dreadful-tasting health burger?”
“I don’t think so.”
He took away the top of the bun and peered at the patty. “It’s got writing on
it,” he said.
Mary Ellen edged to the table and examined it. The patty was a purple-gray
color that set off the bold, black news headline on top. “I thought it would be
cute to have writing on it,” she said, thinking quickly.
“What is cute about ‘U. S. Stock Yields Drop 2%’?”
“You like to read the news when you eat. This way you can —”
“Never mind,” he said. He clapped the bun-top over it. He sat up straight in
his chair, closed his eyes, and took a long, deep breath. Then he opened his eyes
and declared with the calm determination of Joan of Arc before her judges, “I
am going to try it now.”
“Would you like it warmed up?” his wife asked. “It has been sitting around

H

e silenced her with a curt shake of his head, snatched up the sandwich, and bit into it. As he chewed his eyes widened and then grew
wider. He chewed faster and swallowed and took another, larger bite.
Then he laid the uneaten half on the little white plate and said, “This is great
stuff. This is one of the best hamburgers I ever ate. Ever.”
Mary Ellen was able to stop herself just in time from shouting out in irritation: “It is a kale burger! For vegetarians! Not a hamburger!”
So she said nothing and only watched as he devoured the remainder.
“Are there any more?” he said. His tone was almost plaintive.
“No,” she said. “It was an experimental model. But I can make more, if there
is popular demand.”
“Well, I’ll demand. Do I count?”
“Oh yes. Would you like to invest in the recipe? If it catches on, we will make
a lot of money and buy Scallion.”
“What is Scallion?”
“A horse not named Lost Vegas.”
“Invest money, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“How much?”
She blurted an enormous figure. “Forty dollars.”
“Whoa. That’s serious money. I’d need to think about that.”
“You say it is a real good burger.”
“I don’t want to pay forty dollars for one hamburger.”
“I’d tell you the secret recipe.”
“Well . . . maybe. I’ll have to think about it.”
“Don’t wait too long,” she said. “Maybe some other people would want it.”
“It’s a good hamburger.”
It is not a hamburger, Mary Ellen thought. It is vegetarian. Then it occurred
to her that any circular object plunked onto bread was hamburger, as far as her
father was concerned. For him, hamburger was the same word as food. If she had
served him a Dolly Parton CD on a bun with mustard, he would have declared
it a good hamburger.
Maybe there were lots of people like her father. If there were, she was going to
be rich, rich, rich. Scallion would be a pampered animal. She would house him
in a golden stable and feed him kale burgers day in and day out. OH
Retired UNCG creative-writing professor and former North Carolina Poet Laureate Fred Chappell first wrote about the headstrong and rebellious Mary Ellen and
her quest for a horse in the November 2012 issue of O.Henry, archived online at
www.ohenrymag.com.
April 2013

O.Henry 55

Friday Night
Fireﬁghters and
Drinking Club
They were good friends who met faithfully every Friday night.
They wanted to change the world, and they did — creating a
spirit of renewal in Greensboro.

By Bill hancocK

The

56

April 2013

Interior of The Mantelworks restaurant on South Elm
Street, an effort to recreate the mood of the 1920s and
1930s in the ’70s.

Theirs

was a world of
urban flight.
Elm Street
in the 1950s had been everyone’s destination for
shopping and business. By the ’70s, downtown
was in free fall, punctuated by empty streets,
sleazy bars, porno bookstores and public fears
that this was no-man’s land after dark.
In the midst of this, a young couple, Bob and
Shelia Williams, did the unthinkable. They opened
a sandwich shop. It would be fun, they said.

They bought an old, three-story building on
the west side of South Elm that decades later
would be the site of the former Bin 33 restaurant. Inside, they recreated a 1920s soda shop
with wooden booths, old radios, a collection of
records on display, and a menu of homemade
soups and sandwiches. They called it The
Mantelworks, since the building earlier housed a
mantel manufacturing company.
Eventually, there were regulars, young wouldbe entrepreneurs who bought and began renovating decrepit downtown buildings, living on the
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

PhotograPh by JeFF waymaN

sun’s glare and the midsummer humidity were
taking a toll on the crowd.
Nevertheless, there she was. Dressed from headto-toe in thick pants and blouse. Elderly. Frail.
Walking slow, struggling really, while pushing
a middle-aged man, her son, in a wheelchair.
Making her way through all the people, standing
shoulder-to-shoulder at Center City Park, there
for the music, food and the crafts for sale along
rows of outdoor tables.
It was the Fourth of July in 2009, and this
was Fun Fourth in downtown Greensboro,
with thousands of people on the streets. All
were oblivious to this elderly woman, forcing her
to pause and change course as they impolitely
strolled in front of the wheelchair.
If only they’d known who she was. You see,
when she was young, this woman, Delia Faber,
was among a half dozen or so couples who whimsically described themselves as “The Friday Night
Firefighters and Drinking Club.”
They were fixtures at a long-ago Elm Street
restaurant called The Mantelworks where they
crowded into the same semicircular wooden
booth against the wall each Friday night. They
showed up with priestly devotion. In their 30s,
they were filled with energy and moxie. They
wanted to change the world — at least their small
part of it. They drank beer, martinis, whiskey
sours, gin and tonics, pushed tables aside to
dance, then ate dinner. They had costume parties. Needled each other with repartee. And they
talked into the night — the gossip and politics of
downtown Greensboro.
This ensemble of partiers, sometimes sitting at
the booth for long hours, set in motion ideas that
pushed the envelope — and helped make downtown what it is today. Now, almost no one knows
what they did.

upper floors, some of them running a business
downstairs. Judi and Dave Hill owned a clock
repair shop at Elm and Washington streets. Jim
and Marilyn Forster lived next door. Al and
Delia Faber owned The Book Trader nearby. Jim
and Jennifer Bennett owned a building on Davie
Street, two blocks from the restaurant. And John
Tasker owned several downtown buildings.
There were others: Charlie and Hilda
Knowles and Carter and Molly Cooper, who
owned a dollhouse shop downtown. A few were
less regular but very much part of the group.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

“We all sat in this circular booth, and if there
were a lot of people, we’d pull up extra tables and
chairs,” says Judi Hill. “It was mainly people who
lived, worked or owned buildings downtown, but
that applied to almost everyone who came in.”
And everyone got along. “Maybe it’s because
we only met on Friday nights,” she says. “It
wasn’t like we went down there every night. We
just couldn’t. None of us had that kind of time.
We all owned businesses.”
But Friday was their night. They showed up in
the early evening and stayed until closing time,
which was whenever the other customers left.
“Then the waitresses and everyone else would
join us,” says Judi.
If anyone could lay claim as their spiritual
leader, it was Bob Williams. On that, they all
agree. Outgoing, friendly and, above all, fun.
Case in point: During the energy crisis of the
1970s, Bob says, “We turned all the thermostats
down one night. We offered the customers
blankets. We called it ‘bundling.’ We did lots of
things like that.”
Out of the partying and late-night conversations around the table came ideas about changing
downtown — one step and one building at a time.
Bob and Shelia were idea people; they had a good
one early on — a two-day street festival to celebrate the nation’s upcoming 200th anniversary
in 1976. They painted a large sign on the side of
their building to announce the new festival and
its name: “Fun Fourth.” After a few years of running it, they turned it over to good friend Betty
Cone, who headed up the United Arts Council
and became an investor in the restaurant with
her husband, Benji. Thirty-eight years later it’s
one of the city’s largest annual events, still run by
Betty. From the Fun Fourth Festival emerged the
Old Greensborough Preservation Society that
set out to preserve downtown’s historic buildings
on the south end of Elm Street. Dave Hill was
president for a time. Nearly all of the Friday night
group served on its board at one time or another.
After a few years, Bob and Shelia added a cabaret
stage at the back of the building, inviting theater
groups to perform. Mark Woods brought in his
small company of actors, staging eighteen plays
before moving to High Point and creating The
North Carolina Shakespeare Festival. “The
festival has The Mantelworks at its core,” says
Woods. “I’m not sure there would have been a
Shakespeare Festival without them.”
As the Friday night group tackled renovations
to their own buildings, they dived headlong into
downtown eyesores, closing down two bars, and
convincing city officials to plant trees up and down
the street, paying for part of it themselves. They
began a small newspaper about downtown, called
The Hamburger Square Post. It’s still around today.
But there was always time for fun, like the
“Who Shot J.R. Party” from the old Dallas televi-

sion show and “A Night to Remember” party
from an old gangster movie, everyone dressing in
Roaring ’20s clothes.
Then came the fire. Davie Street. April 13,
1985. The Lofts at Greensborough Court, a large
apartment complex, was under construction on
South Elm. The backside of the large complex,
facing Davie, turned into a raging fire, threatening to spread up and down Elm Street from one
building to the next.
Jim Bennett, one of the Friday night members,
spent the night atop his three-story building, garden hose in hand, spraying his roof as the flames
across the street shot into the sky. Police ordered
him down. He refused, and he wasn’t the only
one on his roof. At The Mantelworks, the chef
also pulled a hose to the roof, spraying it to keep
cinders away.
When the group showed up again at The
Mantelworks, they found a red sign atop their
table. In black letters it read: The Friday Night
Firefighters and Drinking Club. No clue as to
who put it there. The name stuck.
In 1989, The Mantelworks closed. The
“Firefighters” tried another restaurant but it didn’t
fit. And by then, downtown’s revitalization was
catching steam from other groups and organizations.

Over

the years, most of
the “Firefighters”
have kept in touch.
Judi and Dave Hill’s business has turned into
Thousands O’Prints, which their son operates.
Their neighbor Jim Forster is the longtime owner
of Jae-Mar Brass & Lamp Co. on Barnhardt
Street by the railroad tracks on Elm. Bob and
Shelia have for many years lived in Summerfield.
John Tasker is involved in real estate. Both Al
and Delia Faber have died.
At The Mantelworks, fire gutted the building
in 2003. After that the land was left a vacant lot
for years. It became the site of Bin 33 restaurant,
which is being replaced by a Ham’s.
Could others have done what they did?
Maybe. But no one else did. Not back then. Betty
Cone puts it best. It was, she said, their early
energy and willingness to push the envelope a
little bit that made the difference. “People like
Bob and Al and Delia and others were pioneers
creating a new life downtown. And eventually a
lot of people drifted to that kind of spirit.”
As for me, I’m often reminded of Delia Faber
pushing her son’s wheelchair though that crowd at
Center City Park on July 4, so invisible to them all.
If only they’d known that she and the other Friday
Night Firefighters did nothing less than inspire
the revitalization of downtown Greensboro. OH
Bill Hancock is the former editor and publisher of
99blocks Magazine in downtown Greensboro.
April 2013

Miss Meemaw and Bubba Take Your Life Questions
Dear Bubba and Meemaw: I never
thought I’d be asking for advice from
people like you, but I’m desperate, so
here goes. I’m in love with my neighbor’s chicken. I know the Bible says
thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s
wife or his ass and such like. But I
see nothing in there about chickens.
My question is, am I a sinner for loving my neighbor’s chicken? Her name is Fiona, and she is lovely.
Signed, Lonely Roger

Dear Bubba and Meemaw: I have
struggled with my weight for years.
I used to be a size 2, but after three
children and early menopause, I have
ballooned to a size 4. I have tried
everything to lose those extra three
pounds, but nothing works. I cannot
get rid of the little Tootsie Roll of fat
on my belly. Should I just throw in
the towel and buy a new “fat” wardrobe? P.S.: I work in a bakery.
Signed, Patsy in Pastry

Meemaw replies: Roger, hon, you ain’t no real sinner. But you’re crazy as a bedbug.
First off, you got to get that stewing hen outta your sight. Too much temptation. I
suggest you kidnap her and drop her off at my house ’round dinnertime Sunday.
Problem solved.

Meemaw replies: Honey, you done made Meemaw sick.

Bubba replies: I got to go with Miss Meemaw on this one, son. But it’s dang worryin, this thing you got for a chicken, against the natural order as the Good Book
talks about. Just remember the goats and sheep will someday be divided, though I
reckon both might have good reason to give you a wide berth until then. I’d call me a
decent shrink or large animal vet immediately.
Dear Bubba and Meemaw: I am 42 years old and recently separated from my
husband. He abused me, stole from me, hated my family and ate my yogurt without
asking. I miss him like the dickens. What should I do?
Signed, Truly Confused Tessa
Meemaw replies: Lord have mercy. Where is your sense, girl? A man who eats his
wife’s yogurt without permission ain’t worth having around. Fact, a man who eats
yogurt at all is kindly on the edge. Cut him loose.
Bubba replies: You sure touched a raw nerve on that one, sugar pie . See, I once
ate a whole Mason jar of pickled quail eggs Miss Meemaw’d set out for Easter
lunch and she about ran my rear-end out of the county. I ate a spoonful of plain
white yogurt once and it tasted like spoiled buttermilk. So I can’t figger any real
fella eatin’ that stuff except by pure accident — especially if his wife is involved.
He’s just asking for trouble.

Bubba replies: Sorry, Patsy, you pushed the wrong button. Miss Meemaw’s always
been a big-boned gal, see, and middle-age ain’t been all that kind to her, truth be
told. I casually suggested she sign up to do some “before” shots for the new Weight
Watchers class being formed in the basement of the Baptist church and durn if I
didn’t wind up sleepin’ on the porch for a month. I say shovel in them yeast rolls and
fried pies, Patsy, and fret about that extra weight! There’ll just be more of you for your
man to love!
Dear Bubba and Meemaw: Two years ago, our nerdy son Scooter dropped out of
high school. We were embarrassed by this and did not tell our families. Instead, we
perpetuated a charade that he was still in school and doing well. Meanwhile, Scooter
has founded an Internet company and made millions. Here’s the problem: This
spring, our families will expect invitations to Scooter’s graduation, but there will be
no graduation. Should we come clean to our families?
Signed, A Secretly Proud Mama
Meemaw replies: Lord, no, whatever you do, do not tell them the truth. They will
be all over you for that money. Take a sliver of that cash and buy you some fake invitations. Throw yourself a nice fake party. Hire Scooter some fake high school buddies if
you have to. When your family comes to the party, tell them Scooter is going to some
up-North college to study philosophy and cross-stitching. You will never hear from
them again.

Dear Bubba and Meemaw: Recently, I saw my best friend’s wife having lunch with
her personal trainer in a secluded Italian restaurant. I know that people are free to
have lunch with anyone they want, and this could have been strictly all business, but
I am slightly suspicious, as they were having sex in the booth. I am willing to forget
about it this time, but should I say something if I see it again?
Signed, A Deeply Worried Friend

Bubba replies: Meemaw’s right. You’ll just turn ’em into a bunch of mooches
like my half-cousin Phil Roger who still ain’t returned either my beloved
Husqvarna chain saw or the bass boat I borrowed from my boss when he got in
trouble with the law and had to go off to Florida for a spell. Might tell ’em Scooter
was so smart he graduated early and got himself on one of them crazy “reality”
shows. I saw a young fella on one the other night who’s become a millionare growing watermelons shaped like the heads of U.S. presidents. That boy’s got major
talent. Maybe Scooter does, too!

Meemaw replies: Yes, you should, dear. Out of sight, out of mind is often the best
policy in matters of infidelity and taxidermy. But if you see ’em going at it again in
view of God and country, I’d march myself straight up to the booth and say: “Listen
up, you two! GO GET A ROOM, for heaven’s sake, before I have to call your
spouses and the health department!”

Dear Bubba and Meemaw: I am a shopaholic. I buy things I don’t need because
it makes me feel better temporarily. I have a closet full of shoes and clothes with the
tags on them. Unfortunately, I can afford this lifestyle, so there is no financial incentive to quit, but I know it is not healthy. What should I do?
Signed, Sherri the Born Shopper

Bubba replies: One thing can quickly lead to another, darlin, especially if they’s Eyetalian food involved. I speak from experience having once stumbled upon my fiancée
Bernice and her first cousin Eugene sharing more than a double cheese Whopper
in the back of his Firebird at the Burger King. Sometimes it’s all for the best, though.
Me and Bernice broke up, and I met Meemaw not 24 hours later. I knew she was
different and probably my soul mate from our very first date. For one thing, she loves
McDonald’s, ’specially them little fish bites and green Shamrock shakes.

Meemaw replies: Honey, long as you can afford it, I wouldn’t bother with it. Let’er
rip, Tater-chip! But it might make you feel better to give some of them clothes and
shoes to truly deservin’ people. For example, Meemaw wears a size 7 s⁃ hoe.

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Bubba replies: Meemaw’s always been a big gal with princess feet. If you need to feel
better about yourself and got the plastic to support your habit, I say keep on shoppin’!
Shoppin’ is as American as ownin’ a borrowed bass boat or eatin’ three times a day
any place but Burger King. OH
April 2013

O.Henry 59

60

April 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Story of A House

Lost and Found Barn
Talented renovators Cyndy and Rick Hayworth turned a sad
one-story house into a home of rediscovered treasures

By Jim Schlosser

T

he house at 1903 North Elm Street may lack that all-important real estate ingredient: location.
A clever agent, however, could, with a slight stretch,
boast that the house sits on the fringe of Irving Park.
Nevertheless, it faces one of Greensboro’s busiest streets.
A car trying to turn across traffic into the driveway the other
day had to let at least twenty other cars pass. The house also
wouldn’t please a suburban purist, who would likely be put off
by its proximity to a commercial district. A gas station, barbershop and drugstore are practically next-door neighbors.
Plus, the house has a scandalous past: A previous owner
used a backyard building — called the Above Ground
Basement — as a high-stakes poker parlor. Rumors buzzed of
women in the gambling den. The owner also took full advantage of the front yard. He sold autos there.
But Cyndy Hayworth wasn’t daunted by the house’s
reputation or the busyness around it. She was used to living
in homes of different shapes and comfort levels. She and her
husband, Rick, once lived in a tobacco barn they converted near
Summerfield. They sold it for eleven times what they paid for
it. After two more houses in the rural area, they moved in 2005
to 1905 North Elm, at the corner of Newlyn Street. That’s next
door to their present 1903 North Elm home.
Investing $100,000, they renovated the corner house so beautifully it was
chosen for the city’s Home and Garden Tour in 2007.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

“Anything Cyndy does is A1,” says former neighbor Olivia Kelly. “She is
a perfectionist.”
In 2009, the Hayworths turned their attention and money to the neighboring house. It was built in 1960 by a contractor who lived there briefly.
It also served as the parsonage of nearby Newlyn Street United Methodist.
In more recent times came the poker-playing, car-hustling man. When the
Hayworths bought it, the house had been converted into a group home.
Since then, the couple has transformed the house into
a stunning abode. It is classic ranch-style, common in the
1950s and 1960s (and said to be making a comeback), except
removal of walls have made the floor plan open. The house is
hard to miss with its celery green facade.
The reaction of anyone peeking through the front door
may be similar to that of famed archeologist Howard Carter.
When he first looked into King Tut’s tomb and was asked if
he saw anything, Carter replied, “Yes, wonderful things.”
Cyndy and Rick have made the rounds of area antique
shops and old houses, buying lots of wonderful things. The
floral pedestal decorating the entrance came from the studio
of renowned interior designer Virginia Zenke.
The double doors to the Hayworths’ den are from Chinqua
Penn Plantation in Rockingham County. Cyndy found them
there perched against a garage and paid $200 for the pair.
Granted, some of the window slots in the doors were missing
or cracked, but she had replacements installed in varying colors. She says
guests find the odd glass combinations fascinating.
At Mary’s Antiques, she spotted some mahogany doors from Tahiti.
April 2013

O.Henry 61

They had once been part of a horse barn. The ironwork on the horse barn doors remains.
The doors now lead into what were three bedrooms. The Hayworths removed a wall to merge
two of the rooms. The space that was once a bedroom is now a home office, decorated with an
elegant French mirror that includes stitched embroidery. It came from Kinnaman’s Antiques.
An 1800s’ Louis XV high-back bed with beautiful inlaid woodwork dominates one of the two
remaining bedrooms. Cyndy bought it at the Antique Mart for $150. She says an interior designer
told her it’s easily worth $8,000.
Typical of ranch houses, a narrow hall once ran between the three bedrooms. The Hayworths
removed the walls, creating a large open space connecting the bedrooms. To enlarge the master
bedroom, they added six feet to the back of the house. Cyndy and Rick had a stained-glass window
from Ellenberg & Shaffer Glass Art built into the wall over the bed. Cyndy loves the gold light that
streams in through it.
The “man’s bathroom,” as Cyndy calls it, connects to the master bedroom. This is Rick’s space,
as evidenced by a piece of furniture with a sink they found in Burlington. It stands high, perfect for
a man who doesn’t want to bend far to reach the faucets. The shower has a solar tube overhead that
lets in light even when the rest of the room is dark.
In Cyndy’s nearby bathroom is her favorite find, a claw-foot bathtub in which she soaks daily. It’s
got quite a backstory. She and her husband had been looking for an antique tub they liked without
success. Then a neighbor around the corner on Newlyn Street said she had a claw-foot tub in her
garage. It was just what the couple was looking for. While cleaning it, they found a note attached to
the bottom: “1929 Starmount Farm.”
Starmount Farm was the large home of Ed and Blanche Benjamin, who continued to live in the
house even after Ed built Friendly Shopping Center in one horse pasture and Burlington Industries
headquarters in an adjoining pasture.

62 O.Henry

April 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

April 2013

O.Henry 63

64

April 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

Blanche Benjamin stayed on in the house after her husband’s death. When she died, the house
was moved a short distance to Northline Avenue in the shopping center. It is now the plantation-like
headquarters for Junior Achievement of Central North Carolina. Cyndy Hayworth just so happens
to be president and CEO of Junior Achievement.
Within arms’ reach of the tub is an antique gold-plated coal box. It came from the Red Collection,
and Cyndy uses it to store odds and ends, including her bathing supplies.
The living room and kitchen were once two rooms. The Hayworths ripped out the kitchen walls.
The kitchen and living room are now one, with an arched ceiling between them, held up by columns
that are wood but made to look like limestone. She found the columns at Mary’s Antiques. With the
walls gone, Cyndy likes to work in the kitchen while carrying on a conversation with guests seated in
the living room.
The original fireplace remains, but the pink bricks are gone. The fireplace has been redone to
resemble an Italian wall. To cover holes that were there to send out heat from a blower inside the old
fireplace, Cyndy and Rick installed old radiator grates they bought at Mary’s Antiques.
The house’s floors remain hardwood but the light color of old has given way to a merlot color.
Crown molding has been added to every room.
Oh, let’s not forget the Above Ground Basement, which the Hayworths have renamed The Man
Retreat. It has been completely redone, and Rick, a machinist at Lorillard, uses it as a get-away place
to read and watch television.
The Hayworths almost didn’t buy the house. They were so angry at what was happening in the
block, they considered selling the house on the corner and returning to the country. The target of
their outrage was the group home that had opened in what’s now the Hayworths’ home.
“It was absolutely horrible,” Cyndy says. She had no complaints about the patients. But the staff
arrived and departed 24-7. They used part of the Hayworth’s adjoining yard to turn cars around.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

April 2013

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66

April 2013

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

One day, while Cyndy was talking to the man who owned the house and leased it to the group
home, he announced plans to pave the front yard.
That did it. On the spot, the Hayworths made the owner a low-ball offer for the house. He accepted. At first, the couple thought they would touch up the house and flip it. But the downturn in
the housing market nixed that idea. They decided to lease out their two-story corner house and move
next door to the one-story house, even though that meant another expensive renovation.
Cyndy says they reduced the house down to its studs. She estimates they spent $100,000 redoing the
2,600 square feet, plus the 700 square feet that comprises The Man Retreat. Together with what they
spent earlier renovating the corner house, “We have put a lot of money into this block,” Cyndy says.
Their goal in buying items for the house is “to find things we like and when put together with
other things it all fits together,” Cyndy says. The decor includes oil paintings done by Cyndy.
And Cyndy didn’t always need Rick’s help in moving heavy things around the house. She is a
former powerlifter with three national and two state titles to her name.
As for noise on North Elm, they don’t hear it. The house is well-insulated. And they love being near the business district, which includes the popular Brown-Gardiner Drug Store, with its
venerable soda fountain. The couple often walks there or to nearby State Street, with its shops and
restaurants.
Proud is too mild to describe Cyndy’s feelings about the house.
“People come in and they can’t get over it,” she says. “They say, ‘This should be in a magazine.’ We
have heard that so many times.”
And now it is. OH

For anyone who loves good food and great gardening wisdom, April brings
a special gift in the form of The Four Season Farm Gardener’s Cookbook ($22.95)
by Barbara Damrosch and Eliot Coleman, America’s foremost authorities
on organic gardening and the gurus of sustainable living. These two national
treasures have put together a sumptuously illustrated and powerfully useful exegesis on how to create the perfect sustainable garden — and what extraordinary
things you can do with what comes out of it. The first half of the book is devoted
to why and how you should grow your own food, including detailed, easy-todigest advice and helpful working plans for providing the best soil and growing
the most nutritious organic food. Part two takes you into the kitchen at Four
Seasons Farm near Blue Hill, Maine, where Barbara and Eliot dazzle their guests
with 120 of the finest homegrown recipes you’ll
ever taste ranging from the simple sandwiches to
the most memorable stews, soups, roasts, salads
and desserts (hint: the Stuffed Squash Blossom
Fritters are a sublime opener), often served alfresco
in the garden. Take it from the Almanac Gardener,
who has been lucky enough to dine with them
twice, this is one garden and kitchen resource you’ll
be using like your favorite garden gloves. Look for
an excerpt in next month’s O.Henry magazine.

By Noah Salt

April commences with a celebrated day of pranks dating
to medieval times and winds up with our national homage to
trees, also known as Arbor Day. Between these calendar points,
temperatures range upward seven degrees, rain typically falls in
abundance, and Southern gardens burst forth with flowers galore
— beds of tulips and hyacinth, iris and dogwoods, apple trees and
azaleas have their big moment, as do rhododendron and early
daylilies, daisies and allium. Lawns are at their greenest, dotted
with dandelions and screaming for a good
mowing. Now is the time to plant
cosmos and zinnia seeds straight into
the warming soil. The woods are
full of Virginia bluebells and the
roadside ditches wear carpets
of the first buttercups — so
common in grazing meadows
worldwide. English farm lore
holds they are the reason
butter is yellow.

Out in the garden,
Out in the windy, swinging dark,
Under the trees and over the flower-beds,
Over the grass and under the hedge-border,
Someone is sweeping, sweeping,
Some old gardener.
Out in the windy, swinging dark,
Someone is secretly putting in order,
Someone is creeping, creeping.

In Roman mythology, Flora
was celebrated as the goddess of
the flower and the renewed cycle
of life with a festival of eating and
drinking and weddings, making
the beginning of the critical growing
season for grapes and olives. The
precise origins of April Fool’s Day are
unknown,
but it is mentioned as early as The Nun’s
Priest’s Tale by Geoffrey
Chaucer in his Canterbury
Tales (1392) wherein a vain
chanticleer cock is fooled by
a wily fox. Iranians also make
a claim to the tradition of innocent prank-making that dates
back to 536 B.C., and the French and Italians each have
their own days dating from medieval times in which masters
attempted to fool servants and even lovers played innocent
tricks on each other. In Scotland, the unwitting “fool” is sent
in search of “gowks,” a fowl that does not exist, while in Poland
elaborate hoaxes are common. The idea seems to be to throw off
the seriousness of winter and embrace the whimsy of returning
spring. For those of you who don’t fancy fooling friends or planting trees, National Golf Day is on the 18th, National Kiss Your
Mate Day on the 28th.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

⁃

Katherine Mansfield, from Out in the Garden, 1922

Writer in the Garden
“Peace — and grief — made gardens more
precious. The gaze turned inwards, away from
the world. A retired friend of mine remembers
her father-in-law’s garden, so vital to him and
the family. He had been badly wounded at
the Somme, but seemed completely at peace in his garden, which was
tremendously long but very narrow, the width of their little terraced
house. He grew practically all their vegetables and fruit, and his wife
celebrated Whit Sunday each year with a lunch off the season’s first crop.
He saved his own seeds, sorting out and sowing them in soil that was rich
and black from the compost and manure dug in over many years. He had
a small shed with a folding chair and outside it a patch of lawn circled with
snapdragons. The other flowers — Japanese anemones, gladioli, roses,
chrysanths, stocks, sweet peas, sweet Williams — grew in rows, like the
vegetables. They were poor, since he could not work for a long time after
the war, and the garden was their lifeline, as it must have been for many
people. It used to give him huge pleasure to load his grown-up children
with boxes of vegetables when they called. He never went to a garden
centre in his life.”
From A Little History of British Gardening, 2004, by Jenny Uglow OH
April 2013

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This concert made possible in part with funding from the
Tannenbaum-Sternberger Foundation, and the United Arts
Council of Greater Greensboro and the N.C. Arts Council, a
division of the Department of Cultural Resources.

thursday, april 18, 2013
Support the Carolina Theatre by attending a ‘70s-inspired
Benefit Gala featuring KC and the Sunshine Band.
Choose from an elegant pre-show dinner or high-energy
cocktail party, or just attend the concert.

EARLY AMERICAN SKILLS WORKSHOP. 9
a.m. – 4 p.m. Detailed instructions for hands-on activities and historical background for those interested
in learning about early American culture. Learn how
to create programs that can be tailored to various
historical missions. Egg dyeing, stenciling, quill pen
writing, candle dipping, soap making, and more.
Cost: $10. High Point Museum, 1859 E. Lexington
Ave., High Point. Info/Register: (336) 885-1859.
PARENTS NIGHT OUT AT GREEN HILL
CENTER. 6 – 8 p.m. ArtQuest will be open for

Saturday, April 13 at 5:30pm, at Flintrock Farm in Reidsville, NC
Dinner, Entertainment and Square Dancing
Dress Code:
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NOON AT THE ’SPOON. 12 p.m. Twenty-minute
docent-led tour of the new exhibition, The Penetrating Gaze.
Weatherspoon Art Museum, 500 Tate St., Greensboro. Info:
(336) 334-5770 or weatherspoon.uncg.edu.
POETRY GSO FILM FESTIVAL. 6:45 p.m. Bright Star.
Director Jane Campion’s ﬁlm is the story of the last few years
in the life of one of the major Romantic poets, John Keats.
Rated PG. Central Library, 219 N. Church St., Greensboro.
Info: (336) 373-3617 or www.greensboro-nc.gov.
IN FOCUS OPENING EVENT. 7 - 9 p.m. Photo

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POETRY GSO FILM FESTIVAL. 7 p.m. Disappearance
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Lorca, who disappeared in the early days of the Spanish Civil
War in the 1930s. Rated R. Central Library, 219 N. Church
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HAIR DO PROJECT’S LIVE EXHIBIT. 5:30 p.m.
Through still photography and video, the Hair Do Project
explores subjects’ efforts to utilize their hairstyles so their
outward appearances align with their inner aspirations.
Free and open to the public. The Interactive Resource
Center, 407 E. Washington St., Greensboro. Info: www.
hairdoproject.com.

BEL CANTO CONCERT. 8 p.m. (Saturday);
7:30 p.m. (Monday). “Headed Home.” Celebrate
our home state with “Greensboro: A
Bicentennial Cantata”, composed by Eddie
Bass with texts by former North Carolina
poet laureate Fred Chappell, and an eclectic
program of music featuring a number of other
NC composers. Tickets: $20/general admission; $18/seniors; $5/students. Christ United
Methodist Church, 410 N. Holden Rd., Greensboro. Info:
(336) 333-2220 or www.belcantocompany.com.

•

YOUTH
POETRY SLAM
TOURNAMENT.
Over a dozen North
Carolina high school
and literary teams com-

Somewhere between oooh and aaah!

pete in Louder Than a Bomb, the world’s largest youth poetry festival in the world. Presented by Poet.she, a spoken word
and literary non-proﬁt organization that strives to strengthen
the female presence in the literary and spoken word community. University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Elliot
Center, 1400 Spring Garden St., Greensboro. Info: www.
facebook.com/LTABGreensboro.

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April 29

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FRIENDS OF THE UNCG LIBRARIES DINNER. 6
p.m. Featuring John Shelton Reed, author of Dixie Bohemia:
A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s. Tickets: $50/members;
$60/nonmembers. Walter Clinton Jackson Library and
the Harold Schiffman Music Library, University of North
Carolina at Greensboro. Info: UNCG Box Ofﬁce at (336)
334-4849 or www.uncgfol.blogspot.com.

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April 2013

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The Art & Soul of Greensboro

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The Art & Soul of Greensboro

April 2013

O.Henry 93

Life’s Funny

Lady Liberty
Rocks!
Worried about your taxes? Just dance

By Maria Johnson

I’m a sucker for the Statue of Liberty for

Photograph By sam Froelich

a lot of reasons.
A) She’s a gift from the French. Say what you will about the Frenchies,
but if you look back to the American Revolution, you might note that there
would be no good ol’ U.S. of A. if we hadn’t had their help.
B) Because Lady Liberty is A), she is unusual. I mean, really, who’d a
thunk of sending a giant green lady who stands in the water as a token of appreciation? This falls under the category of Wish I Had Been There When
This Was Pitched.
Bartholdi to gift committee: “I woood like to geev zee Americains a
wooman. A beeg wooman. Wis fire. And zee spikey hat.”
Committee: “Wee, wee, wee! A beeg gween wooman! In a bassrobe! Zey
will adore!”
So there’s that.
And there’s this: In 1929, when my dad was 9 years old, his family came
over on The Big Boat from Greece. The boat was steaming into New York
Harbor and my dad was below deck with his mom when my grandfather
came in and told him to put on some nice clothes because there was a lady
on deck he wanted my dad to meet. So my dad got dressed and went up
top, where my grandfather introduced him to the Statue of Liberty and
explained what she stood for. Freedom. Opportunity. A fresh start. All of
the things they found on the back of my grandfather’s dry cleaning store in
Louisville.
And that, in short, is why I contributed a chunk of my meager reporter’s
paycheck to the renovation of Lady Liberty in the 1980s. It’s why I have a
framed poster of her. And it’s why I love guys like Cornelius “C.T.” Goldston.
C.T. is a waver for Liberty Tax Service.
That’s right, he’s one of the people who dresses like the Statue of Liberty
and stands on the street, waving and dancing, trying to draw attention to the
fact that your taxes are due soon, and whaddya know, Liberty Tax can help.
I remember the first time I saw a dancing Liberty. It was a few years ago.
I was rounding the corner at Holden Road and High Point Road, and there
she — I mean he — was. In a foam crown and a green crushed velvet robe.
Dancing up a storm.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
That wasn’t C.T., but that’s the corner where C.T. got his start as Lady
Liberty last year. His sister-in-law works for Liberty, and she suggested he try
out for a spot. So he auditioned with about ten — yes, ten — other people and
got a waver’s job. Midway through the tax season, they moved him to the
Spring Garden Street location, which is where I saw him a few weeks ago.
Actually, I saw him at the nearby intersection with Aycock Street. His
boss would like for him to stay in front of the store, but C.T. says he catches
more people at the busy intersection. Plus, he’s not as self-conscious dancing
where his co-workers can’t see.
“It’s easier to dance when people keep going,” he says.
The Art & Soul of Greensboro

At 30, C.T. is a shy guy, a man of few words, and when he does allow
them, it’s softly. Also, he’s built like a fire plug, and if you walk up to him
cold, he looks like he’d just as soon smack you as look at you. Until he takes
his shades off. And smiles. Then you see who he really is.
Working as Lady Liberty is not exactly his dream — he plays piano and
drums, and he’d love to do something with gospel music — but he didn’t
graduate from High Point Central, and he knows his options are limited.
He has worked at McDonald’s. And Sonic. And Libby Hill. And now, for
a few months a year, at Liberty.
He has a following. People honk and wave. They stop and get their
pictures taken with him. They send him shout-outs on the radio. There have
been a couple of rubber-neck wrecks because people were watching him
instead of the road.
His boss, Christina Ingram, has no doubt that he has generated business.
“He’s kind of like the Liberty waver celebrity,” she says.
Like most celebrities, C.T. has his own style. He prefers the new Red
Liberty costume designed for business-to-business promotions this year.
He wears his foam crown flipped down, which he says looks flee (a newer
version of fly), and you’ll never catch him without dark shades and ear buds
streaming up-step music.
“I like a cool Liberty,” he says.
He likes to work, too.
C.T. tells the story of a man who stopped as he was driving away from a
competitor’s tax-prep office across the street.
“I respect you for what you’re doing,” the man said.
C.T. caught his meaning: Some people wouldn’t do this for a paycheck.
But C.T. would. He thinks of the man’s comment often. It gets him
through the unpleasant times. Standing in the rain and snow. Being hit by
an egg thrown from passing a car. Being on the receiving end of obscene
gestures and insults. He will not repeat the words that some people have
said to him.
He keeps waving and dancing because he needs money, and even that is
dwindling. The company has cut back on waver’s hours. C.T.’s down to one
four-hour shift a week now, so he’s looking for something else. Lady Liberty
needs work.
“If I had to, I’d shovel poo,” C.T. says. “A job is a job.”
A cold rain is falling. He pulls his foam crown over a knit cap, slides into
gloves, plugs in his music and starts dancing, spinning his hands in front of
him to attract attention and stay warm.
Within seconds, someone honks, and C.T. flashes that smile. What he
won’t tell you, but his boss Christina will, is that recently someone bought
C.T. breakfast because C.T. — who could not afford to keep his scooter and
now relies on a friend for transportation — had given the guy some money
when he was a struggling.
Yes, I love the Statue of Liberty for many reasons. OH
Maria Johnson likes to think of herself as flee, though in fact, as a keeper of
hounds, she is more flea.
April 2013

O.Henry 95

O.Henry Ending

Requiem
for the
Rankin
Family
By Ogi Overman

Everybody has to have a favorite band.
There’s a rule somewhere. Most, I imagine, would be
familiar with household, Beatle-esque names.
Not mine. Nope, mine would be a group very few folks in the good ol’
U. S. of A. have ever even heard of. Granted, they have a rabid cult following here, and are mega-stars in their home country, but you’ve likely never
heard them on the radio or seen them on TV. From that you might surmise
that they’re from some faraway land and play some arcane genre known
only to ethnomusicologists.
Nope again. They play Celtic folk music and are from that obscure
netherworld of . . . Canada. More specifically, Nova Scotia — and even more
specifically Cape Breton Island. They hail from a village of barely a thousand souls, called Mabou. They are the Rankin Family.
I encountered them at my first MerleFest, in 1996, eight years after the
hugely successful Americana music festival was launched. Oh, I would’ve
fallen in love with MerleFest without the Rankin Family, but without
MerleFest, odds are that I would’ve never even heard of the Rankins. Once
I set foot on the campus of Wilkes Community College, where the four-day
festival is held, there was no turning back; I knew I’d found my musical and
spiritual home. But what I had no way of knowing was that I would also
find this group of three sisters and two brothers who would sing and dance
their way into my heart, never to depart.
A photographer friend tipped me off that there was a group that I needed
to see. But his breathless description had less to do with the fact that the
sisters — Cookie, Raylene and Heather — sang the most angelic three-part
harmony this side of the Andrews Sisters and more to do with the fact that
they performed a slight variation of Irish step-dancing — think “Riverdance”
— known as the Cape Breton two-step. They wore tap shoes and brought
a board on stage to amplify the clicks. When they broke into it, the crowd
went ballistic. Watching them was truly mesmerizing.
But even more mesmerizing were those harmonies. One memory stands
out. They sang several of their songs in Gaelic. During one I glanced over
at my crew of four guys. There were tears in the eyes of two of them. Now,
these were battle-hardened vets of the bluegrass circuit, mind you, guys
known to drink rotgut liquor out of a dirty cup on a Sunday morning. But
here they were, bawling like babies over a song they couldn’t understand
a word of. That’s the power of perfect harmony, brothers and sisters, the
universal language.

96 O.Henry

April 2013

After their set I rushed backstage and introduced myself to Cookie and
interviewed her on the spot. I wrote my first story on them that week, the
first of probably a dozen over the ensuing years for the weekly entertainment
tabloid I was editing at the time. My obsession became such that not only
did I buy everything they ever recorded, I had three photos of the sisters
blown up to eighteen-by-twenty-four and framed. I even joined their fan
club, a no-no for a member of the media.
Then, on January 16, 2000, the stage went dark. John Morris Rankin,
the eldest sibling, pianist and fiddler, died. He was taking his son and two
of his teammates to a hockey game when his truck hit a patch of ice and
careened into a fjord. He pulled all three of the kids to safety, but by then
hypothermia had set in and he drowned.
I remember tears falling on my keyboard as I wrote the story.
For years afterward, when MerleFest announced the lineup for the next
year, I prayed for a miracle, that somehow my heroes would regroup and return. Then, in 2007, it seemed that my prayers were answered. John Morris’
daughter, Molly, joined the band and they began touring and recording
again. But, for whatever reasons, they never played MerleFest again. Still, I
never gave up hope.
Until now.
In January, I happened to run into a couple from Nova Scotia. It took all of
no time for the conversation to turn to the Rankins. As I was regaling them
with my longstanding love affair with their favorite sons and daughters, the
lady looked at me plaintively and said, “You haven’t heard, have you?”
After a long battle with breast cancer, Raylene Rankin passed away
September 30, 2012.
This 26th annual renewal of MerleFest will mark the first after Doc’s
passing. There will be tributes every day from every stage, as well there
should be. Amid the music and laughter and camaraderie and fellowship,
there will be tears. A few of them will be mine.
But for a different reason. OH
Ogi Overman has been a reporter, columnist and editor for a number of Triad
publications since 1984. He is currently the editor of the Jamestown News and is
compiling a book of his columns, to be titled A Doughnut and a Dream.
Illustration by Harry Blair

The Art & Soul of Greensboro

速

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